By Alec Hogg*
A friend who had a tough childhood says he was into his teens before discovering carnival music from ice cream trucks was meant to attract children. As a tot, he’d been told it s the way drivers said the ice-cream had run out.
It was a reminder we are an inherently naïve species. One which takes time to accept the fallibility of those we put on pedestals. Grown ups don’t always tell the truth. Sometimes far from it.
In Thursday’s State of the Nation address, Jacob Zuma told his nation that 3.7m “job opportunities” had been created in the last five years. That employment rose by 650 000 last year. And that 15m people are now employed, higher than at any time in the country’s history.
Those are pretty specific claims. One presumes they will stand up to scrutiny. Not having had the chance to test them, it’s hard to reject them out of hand. But something doesn’t sit well with the reality that’s everywhere around us.
Perhaps it’s got to do with those phone calls I still get, two years since relocating, from desperate people in Mooi River begging for a job, any job. Or the growing queues of work seekers my eyes see at pick-up spots around Johannesburg. The common theme we get daily from the CEOs interviewed on CNBC Africa. And the comment this week from the head of an SMME association who told us a survey of members showed 92% would close their businesses if they could get their money out.
On Biznews.com, my favourite economist Cees Bruggemans wrote that we should take the Stats SA figures with a pinch of salt. Clearly that doesn’t apply to politicians. You’d think that before throwing around “facts” with such abandon, JZ or at least those close to him would question how it’s possible for employment to rise 4.5% in a year when economic growth scraped in at 2%?
Perhaps there’s a bigger theme at play here. One I was alerted to in Davos this year by Don Tapscott, a researcher and best-selling author who has a knack for alerting the world to the future long before it happens. Like in 1981 when he wrote a book warning computers would radically change our lives – and was panned because pundits claimed the masses would never learn to type.
Tapscott maintains old-style politics cannot survive. He says younger generations are disgusted by a process which goes along the lines of: Vote for me today and I’ll rule you for the next five years during which time I’ll spend 70% of that time raising money.
He came to this conclusion after concluding his biggest ever research project in almost 40 years in the business. It was a survey of 11 000 young people. One of the telling results was their utter disdain for existing Governance systems. Most of them prefer not to participate, not vote in elections, because doing so would endorse what they see as a sham.
The research was done among young Americans. I keep hearing that South Africa is different. That we live in a Third World country where the apathy of the youth is matched only by their ignorance. Think about it rationally and that argument, like those claimed employment numbers, doesn’t make sense.
Young people are better networked than their parents could dream. Their mobile phones provide ready access to sources of information my generation needed to spend weeks hunting down in libraries. The Internet has democratised knowledge, empowered education.
Our young appreciate they don’t need to actually know the stuff an archaic education system tries to pump into their brains. Because the ugly truth is nobody will ever know as much as Google. So when they need to know something, they simply Google it.
When you really think about it, the social implications of this reality, of the Google Effect, are mind-blowing. Consider, for instance, the hypocrisy of an education system whose cornerstone is the assumption that teachers are better informed than their classrooms of 40 young Google-sussed minds.
That is our new reality. A world where just because someone in authority says so doesn’t make it true. That the carnival music might actually be there to sell more ice creams. And that new jobs aren’t created by some bureaucrat telling us they have been.
* Alec Hogg is the founder and publisher of Biznews.com.  To read more of his contributions, click here. To get this free weekly newsletter sent to your inbox, subscribe by clicking here.Â
