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BizNews Community Member Albert’s conversation with a young black man on a flight to Johannesburg highlights profound misconceptions about demographics and employment in South Africa. The young man, seeking a job without specific skills, assumed a majority white population and full employment among whites. Albert gently challenged these assumptions with official statistics, revealing a stark reality of job scarcity and demographic trends. This exchange underscores the need for factual understanding and constructive dialogue to address deep-seated misconceptions and foster mutual understanding in South Africa’s complex social landscape.
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From BizNews Community Member Albert
I have made it my mission in the last 5 years to try and understand the views and understanding of black people. So my quest is not to convince them of what is right or wrong but simply to try and understand the assumptions they have about reality.
So I was on a flight to Johannesburg and had a black young man sitting next to me and we started to talk. He immediately made it clear that he has graduated from university and is now seeking for a job for more than 6months. When he heard I have my own company he immediately suggested that I give him a job because he is part of the previously disadvantage group. When I question him about the fact that he does not even know what I am doing and whether he has the skills for the job he just commented that he wants a management position which does not require him to have specific skills. Not a good place to start. So I suggested that we should see if we can identify the core problem to solve and look at our assumptions.
My first question I then asked him was if he knew what the population of SA is and he said that he did not know. I then pointed out that it is approx. 60m but immediately suggested that he does not take my word for it and wrote down SA stats website and suggested that he confirm it for himself. The next question I asked him was what % of the 60m people is white and his response stunned me. He suggested that it was more than 50%. This response was typical from all black people I had a discussion with. The range was between 50% and 80% of the population is white. When I indicated that it was about 8% he said that he did not believe me. I then suggest that his behavior is correct and that he should visit government website about the stats of SA. As long as we are attached to the assumption that the white population is between 50 to 80% all their behavior makes sense. I suggested that we proceed with my figures because I have a reference that can be validated and he only have a perception/feeling.
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I then proceeded to ask him how many of the 4.5m white people fall in the age category of 25 to 65 and he indicated that he has no idea. I suggested to use that range because that would be the potential working group of the country (below 25 are in school and after 65 should have been retired) He said he had no idea. I then indicated from SA Stats website it is approx. 1.7m people which includes all white people male and female. I then asked him the question of how many of them does he think has a job and he immediately responded all of them. I then asked for his source of truth and he had no foundation. I suggested that I also do not have any information on that but using my direct family reference about 30% is looking for a job. At that stage we had a family member who completed her medical studies and need to do her hospital year and it is now 6m and they do not have a position for her (and she completed her medical degree with honors). SO lets for the argument take 30% as a guess so that means we have approx. 1,1m white people working. So the conclusion is we all leave the country we can hand over to the black people a max of 1.1m jobs. Firstly we have to acknowledge is that not all the jobs are management positions and that I do not have information on the split between management and worker split but we could assume (which I know is very optimistic) that 80% of them is management. This means that approx. 900k management jobs are available to him if we hand over all jobs to black people. I then proceed to ask him if he think he will be one of the best candidates for the jobs and he suggested that he does not think so. So I then asked him who will he blame next for not being able to find a job and he had no comment.
I suggested that for the moment we park the reality and move to a picture of the future. I suggested that he if he had a miracle wand and could change SA instantly with the wave of his wand, what would it look like and specific I want him to position the white population in the picture. This was a difficult stretch for him but I kept on prompting (no judgement) and he was painting the country full of businesses making money ect and the white people is doing all the work and they are management. I then suggested that we (white people) may need some help to make his dream come true. He was curious. I asked him if he had a idea of how many managers a company of 700 people will have. He said 50 and I suggested that that might be to low and it is closer to 70. Now in order to resource his vision we need to find a mechanism to increase the number of white people in the country to enable the all the black people to fill management positions. I then again quote the statistics of white population in SA from 1910 to date has fluctuated between 4 and 5.5m whereas the black population grew from 8m to 54m. If they were so suppressed and caused them to stay in poor conditions without power and water – what caused them to grow where we as white people virtually did not grow at all? He had no answer.
Maybe you can in your interviews bring this information/reality into the picture.
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