This article was first published by News24 / CityPress on 5 April 2026
A few years ago, I was at Cape Town airport. I was still a smoker back then and since I had just gotten off a two-hour flight, I wanted to smoke. But the conspicuous no-smoking signs made it clear this was impossible. I also wanted to get some food and have a cigarette while doing so. The fact that this was now illegal to do at any restaurant, got me thinking about how exactly the state exercises its power over us.
It’s clear that agents of the state cannot enforce state power just by themselves – we don’t each get assigned a police officer to follow us around. Generally, South Africa doesn’t have cameras everywhere, and even if we did, there are thousands of years of human history with the state and no cameras, recording devices or even electricity. So where does the invisible power that compels us to obey come from?
This is not just an academic question. The reason I was even thinking about this is because I was at the FMF at the time and we regularly worked with victims of state overreach. One was a group called the Langeberg Unemployed Forum (LUF), led by a Mr Xolile Mpini. They had accurately identified labour laws, as I once did when I was unemployed, as the source of their problems.
The reason why I, and I know from conversations with Mr Mpini that this was true for him too, had identified labour laws as the problem, is because I had got so desperate that I would just offer to work for free. I knew that if I made the company money while working for them for free, they would most likely employ me. If not, I would simply ask for a letter of recommendation and so I could gain job experience this way without the company taking any risks.
I was on the left of politics and ideology at that time, and I thought the deal I was offering would be too good to resist for those greedy capitalists. I mean, most of my time was wasted at home doing nothing that was productive. I figured since people actually paid schools to gain a skill, getting experience for free was a good deal.
In my ignorance, I excitedly offered this deal to several employers who I knew were looking for unskilled labour, the type of labour that could nonetheless provide me with a skill. They all refused and I would only find out later that my initiative is illegal under South African law. Laws like the ‘Basic Conditions of Employment Act’ force upon you the right to a salary, even if this right means you end up earning no salary for the rest of your life.
Of course, all these laws reinforce each other. The Labour Relations Act, and National Minimum Wage Act all prevent you forgoing a salary in exchange for gaining experience.
To make matters worse, I then registered for the Department of Labour database of jobseekers. This was a complete joke; I never heard back from them after I registered, and I spent two years unemployed after my registration. This period, more than anything else, made me a libertarian. I still get angry when I think about the injustice and the perversion of morality that has the people who create these ‘laws’ patting themselves on the back as if they did something good for the people they are keeping unemployed.
Even if the experience you gain from working for free is not recognised, you still learned a valuable skill. It can be used to start your own business in many cases. This is especially true for skills like programming, plumbing, carpentry, hairdressing, cooking etc. In fact, this type of skills transfer is what we need to end unemployment for good. The problem is that we have people running the country who think a skill is something different from a productive job.
Listening to President Ramaphosa complain about the failure of SETAs, I could tell he does not understand what skills really are. Otherwise, he would have long realised that the idea behind SETAs cannot solve unemployment. Only productive businesses can give people productive skills. Everything else is inferior to this, even if it sometimes works.
A better approach to skills development would be to allow companies to designate any entry-level job as a traineeship (paid or unpaid and without too much paperwork). Then allow these companies to give certificates if they feel the person has learned enough to do the job; if not, the company doesn’t have to issue the certificate but if they hire the person they must issue a certificate.
Do not regulate the process, and do not promise that this will solve unemployment. Just have it available as an option so hardworking young people can gain skills. I still remember that what finally ended my frustration, after years of trying to teach myself programming online, was meeting a local (based in my hometown) web developer who was willing to teach me on weekends. We were technically working in his freelance business, and he felt uncomfortable not paying me anything, so we agreed on R300/month.
But this money was in addition to him paying for my Microsoft certificate after teaching me. He was one of the nicest people I have ever met and the reason I was able to break into web development without a computer science degree. According to the law, this man, the man who gave me my first break after getting no help from government programs (I also tried to start businesses and get government funding), was exploiting me.
So back to my musings about how exactly the state exercises power over us, as I stood outside the airport terminal building with the cold Cape winds making me regret being a cigarette addict, the answer finally came to me: we were policing each other. While it may be obvious to everyone else, I realised that the state exercises its power over us through our neighbours who don’t work for government.
If we are willing to report one another for breaking laws that don’t harm anyone, the state is able to exercise power over us. One of the local supermarkets here in Newcastle was forced to sell to Shoprite’s Usave because they were paying their employees below minimum wage and one of their employees reported them. They all lost their jobs and USave didn’t hire any of the former employees, it has been years now and some are still unemployed.
If we want to reduce unemployment, grow the economy and create prosperity (and banish poverty), we will have to get to a point where we trust each other. This is why Ethiopian/Pakistani immigrants don’t hire South Africans at their shops as a rule; they would rather hire people from their communities, often family. They know that if they start hiring South Africans, it is likely someone will report them to the authorities.
This is something poor people must do for themselves; the middle class mostly doesn’t understand this issue. If you are poor and unemployed, you should be on the side of the businessperson who needs cheap or even free labour. I do not think we will ever have a government who understands this. That’s why the late former labour minister, SARB governor and finance minister, Tito Mboweni, once implied in an interview with either Bloomberg or CNBC, before his tenure as finance minister, that we should just forget about the unskilled workers and start afresh by educating the youth.
This enraged me; these are people he was talking about so carelessly, he didn’t care about the dire poverty these people live in and his role in creating it as the architect of our labour laws. To paraphrase Steve Biko, ‘unemployed man, you are on your own.’ Work with businesses to undermine the people keeping you unemployed. No one is coming to save you if you don’t do it yourself.
