In my hometown, Bethal – a tiny Mpumalanga town of about 128 000 residents surrounded by coal mines and power stations – Eskom could close or reconfigure the many coal power stations in the area.
This simply means fewer jobs for young people seeking employment.
On the other hand, the massive R25 billion to R35 billion hybrid wind and solar facility currently being developed, already visible from afar when approaching Bethal, has not absorbed significant numbers of jobless youth.
Young people in Bethal are eager to work, but the opportunities remain scarce.
The lucky ones get employment at Sasol’s Secunda operations, whose future hinges on a managed transition from a pure coal-based synthetic fuels facility to a lower-carbon chemical and energy hub.
But not all hope is lost.
On Monday, JSE-listed Netcare published its financial results for the six months to end-March 2026, detailing the success of its 10-year strategy launched in 2018.
That strategy focuses on customer-centric, digitally enabled, and AI-driven care.
With wearable monitoring pilots underway, generative AI on the horizon, and a proven digital dividend, Netcare is positioning itself as the provider of choice across the continent.
As I pondered Netcare’s digital strategy, it dawned on me that SA’s state institutions still suffer from a serious paper pandemic.
We often hear the Department of Health singing praises of improvements in healthcare, but there is a deafening silence on how that claimed success can be measured.
Staff often fail to locate patient files. Besides, filing cabinets have proven to be a fire hazard, as happened at Thembisa hospital.
Every morning, millions of citizens queue at dawn outside government departments because a physical stamp or a missing file is required.
The education department cannot predict school dropouts because attendance records are still in exercise books.
The Department of Human Settlements doesn’t know how many shacks are at squatter camps. Social grants are duplicated because ID numbers are typed into incompatible spreadsheets.
So, what if the government stopped the tenderisation approach to resolve youth unemployment?
What if it created a National Digitisation Strategy instead?
Declare a decentralised mass employment programme for unemployed graduates, women, and talented youth.
Get rid of all the SETAs and reprioritise those multi-million-rand budgets to solve the scourge of unemployment.
Here is how it could work.
Unemployed youth and women aged 18 to 34 can be trained as data capturers or technicians at state institutions.
They could go department to department, scanning 30 years of manual records. Digitise birth, death, health, prison, and deeds records rotting in state basements.
Barcode every medical asset in every clinic and hospital.
Persons with disabilities can perform remote, screen-based work, checking scanned files for errors and meta-tagging documents from home in Galeshewe or a wheelchair in KwaMbonambi.
Graduates, the so-called overqualified unemployed, can be assigned as process mappers.
They could shadow a pension payout officer for two weeks, map every touchpoint, and redesign workflows for digital capture.
This programme would be a new EPWP model focused on digitisation. It would help millions of unemployed youth, women and graduates.
The government must wake up and understand that while people will not say no to the R370 grant, they need sustainable jobs.
The Treasury would not need to raise more debt; This is simple budget reprioritisation without tenderpreneurs.
The private sector would likely support it because every hour a tender document is lost, a business loses money and time.
A digitised state would mean less corruption in the police, prisons, schools, and health facilities.
The tender mafia could go out of business because procurement systems would be transparent and auditable, and decentralised by the province.
After two to three years, the country would have a digitally literate workforce ready for big data and AI.
With this in mind, try to imagine for a second that on Youth Day, June 16, President Cyril Ramaphosa announces the mass digitisation of government records as a much-needed employment drive for young people.
Mr. President, this is not just a tech policy dreamt from the town of the late Gert “The Lion of East” Sibande, it is a basic employment creation programme that your Ministers & DGs are ignoring because it has no tenders.
Instead of being distracted by corruption and collapsing municipalities, your secret weapon to solve youth unemployment is the intelligent army of unemployed youth and graduates you are ignoring.
The solution is facing you and saying, “Do something with us.”
Let us stop the fancy slogans, this upcoming Youth Month.
*The author of this article is Gugu Lourie, Founder and Editor of Techfinancials.co.za. The views expressed by Gugu Lourie are not necessarily those of The Bulrushes
