A Soweto man rises early in the morning, baths and heads to work. So far this is a pedestrian – even cliched – routine anywhere in the world and certainly doesn’t merit a feel-good write up on one of the country’s premium media outlets, Daily Maverick. Except Brian Chauke’s gig – likely inspired by a combination of desperation, a persistently grueling economic spell where jobs are bled regularly and those on the margins finding themselves pushed ever closer to the precipice – is so unique as to be ingenious. It even gets the big cameras hurtling towards peripheral Diepsloot, Soweto, and impels readers to cast fresh eyes on the township gig economy.
Chauke’s tarrif is spent queueing at ATMs. And when he gets to the front of the pack, the man then proceeds to ‘sell’ his place to those at the back of the line before repeating the exercise all day long.
His asking price for the poll position is R20 but he will accept less when the client doesn’t have enough change on them. To ailing and frail pensioners, he is a godsend and he registers no complaints about the R5 that the elderly and infirm often offer him for the coveted number one spot. For 17 years he’s been at this ‘job’ and has established a rapport with his clients, but he still has not given up on the increasingly illusive promise of steadier employment. But in light of his mature age, the odds are stacked severely and he may find himself slipping into what I’ve dubbed the unaccounted labourer – those who are not in employment, education or training (NEET) or who have entirely given up the search for work.
StatsSA’s figures from the fourth quarter of 2024 show that unemployment has barely flinched at 31.9%. For the youth, as usual, the numbers are unkind with a shocking 4.7 million (44.6%) of them jobless. Government’s most publicised efforts to stave off the crisis come in the Presidential Youth Employment Intervention, the Expanded Public Works Programme and a swathe of internships in the Sector Education and Training Authorities (SETAs) which – despite being considered a lifeline on one hand – have increasingly come under fire (even amongst the unions)as indecent work that most often only meaningfully benefits virtually no one but industry bosses. Internships have become synonymous with negligible absorption levels and what is marketed as ‘on the job training’ often amounts to qualified graduates being only useful as de facto tea ladies.
With this demotion naturally comes a sense of disillusion and dissatisfaction, a pervasive purposelessness as these young interns are usually lumped back to their misery when the contract has expired only to be replaced by other graduates who can expect to be met by the same fate. Against this backdrop, there has been a proliferation amongst SA’s labour force who have been shoved into the territory of unconventional, even little known of means to earn their keep.
The informal economy is lauded as a boon in such circumstances but reading up on this terrain, in particular its online aspect, one stumbles on a whole new can of worms. For example, the investigative journalists at amaBhungane have found that the online trading syndicates with their conniving scams ‘shows how the trading platforms, behind the veil of fancy websites and seeming regulatory compliance, had one foot planted firmly in the illicit financial system.’ It is a world of fly-by-night money movers where ‘thousands of people invested millions of rands and nearly always losing all of it after being misled and harassed into disastrous and possibly fictitious investments.’
Yet amid the seemingly legitimate companies amongst the many red flags, on social media online trading is a glorified and glitzy affair with traders constantly pictured beaming alongside capacious mansions and fast German cars. The scammers are just as active and, operating in a country of such vast disparities, they usually don’t have to do much to find gullible victims to con. This parallel online universe runs far deeper and can get uglier particularly for the girl-child.
A Unicef office of research (Innocenti) study in collaboration with ECPAT and INTERPOL entitled Disrupting Harm in South Africa Evidence on online child sexual exploitation and abuse makes for disturbing reading. The discreet nature of the internet makes it fertile ground for pedophilia and all manner of sinister cyber crimes.
As a result, according to Wikipedia, ‘generally, South African girls are trafficked for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation and domestic servitude.’ Furthermore 55.5% of ‘all trafficked people in South Africa [are] female and ‘more than three-quarters of all victims are between the ages of 12–25.’ The paper also finds that some of the trafficking is not coerced and that victims ‘enter on their own accord, as they are faced with economic hardships that leave them desperate for a better life.’
The upsurge in adult entertainment platforms where particularly young people disappear into platforms like OnlyFans and such other adult content platforms, means that these deeds fly well below the radar of public scrutiny. Though not entirely gone, the ‘world’s oldest profession’ is no longer confined to truck pit stops or seedy downtown alleyways but thrives inside households and college accommodation. In the Northern Cape, where the world of sex work is one that appears to happen from afar mainly because of a virtually non-existent media, the stories are never told. But they lurk out on the highways and inside the shebeen and on the mouths of women who feel that they just weren’t empowered enough to have many choices available to thel. Of all the grim stories that a newshound sometimes comes across, theirs are the most raw and heartbreaking, usually told with the frankness of a person who doesn’t expect any more ugly surprises from life. This a series of stories I hope to cover, the ones that will hopefully give those who are positioned to make a difference something to think about.
But, despite the travails, in the platteland the men and women are made of sterner stuff. Hard times often mean thinking out of the box and rising very early, ideally with a shovel in hand and the whole day to weed and sweat without blaming anybody. Like these two gentlemen over here, one jobless, the other on the dole. With the Easter festivities around the corner, being penniless is not the sort of station one would want to find oneself in. Thankfully, the generous rainfall of late has been good on their gig. The lawns and weeds stand knee-high and homeowners are constantly on the lookout for affordable hands to get rid of the muck. And just like that our team is in the game.
Or how about the nimble-footed young Rivaldo Afrika, guiding a motorist into a parking bay in town? To most people he might be shrugged-off as a pesky car guard, but he and his team are enterprising lot. They’ll help you haul furniture, do an impressive paint or gardening job and if you happen to have a business along the street, they’ll keep it litter-free. And if you’re not too eager to jump back into your car, you may want to listen to their very moving stories. Trust me, it’ll make you less whining of your own misfortunes.
When they wrote that the kasi is a dynamic place, they weren’t kidding. So don’t be surprised to find barefoot kids knocking around a tattered plastic soccer ball next to a well-dressed man who is trying to figure out how to operate his drone. His new acquisition is something of a novelty and the ideas on how he could profit from it are endless. He could use it to videograph big events, after all, as things stand, he’d be the only one advantaged enough to offer aerial footage. While at it, I suggest, he takes footage of the town as well, particularly the tourist attractions and start some sort of social media page. It wouldn’t be anything innovative but I doubt I’ve seen many locals in the business of promoting the town. He flashes a half-hearted grin. I’ll take it. It suggests that he’s at least half-thinking about it. And halves in the land of nothing are a great deal to go on.