THE 800 MILLION JOB GAP: WHO WILL CLOSE IT?- Fred M’membe

The World Bank’s answer is more private capital, more “regulatory certainty” for investors, and more of the same market-led model that has governed our economies for four decades. Mr Banga reports that the private capital mobilised by the World Bank Group has more than tripled in recent years. And yet the gap remains. It remains because private capital goes where profit is highest, not where jobs are most needed. It builds what pays its shareholders, not what employs our young people. An investor’s “certainty” is too often a worker’s insecurity.

We do not doubt Mr Banga’s concern. We doubt his cure. Four decades of structural adjustment, privatisation and IMF-supervised austerity were sold to Africa as the road to jobs. They gave us deindustrialisation, the sale of our mines, and an economy that exports raw wealth and imports finished goods. The 800 million job gap is not a failure of that model to work. It is what that model produces.

In Zambia, our young people do not need the World Bank to tell them this. They live it. Walk through any of our markets and you will find young men and women with diplomas and degrees selling talktime, hawking, or waiting for a piece job that may never come. Thousands more leave our colleges and universities every year into an economy that has no place prepared for them. Many of those counted as “employed” are surviving in the informal economy, without a contract, without protection and without a future. This is not a personal failing of our youth. It is a structural crisis, and it cannot be solved by waiting on the free market, foreign corporate benevolence or austerity.

• Agricultural Investment. The state must invest directly in peasant and small-scale farming and in state-supported agribusiness: irrigation, storage, mechanisation, extension services and guaranteed markets. Young people must be organised into cooperatives and given land, inputs and credit to farm and to process what they grow. This will secure our food sovereignty and draw hundreds of thousands of young people into productive work.

• Free Skills Training Tied to the National Plan. The state must provide free, universal access to technical, scientific and vocational training. But training alone is not enough. A certificate without a job is another disappointment. Our skills programmes must be planned together with our industrial and agricultural programmes, so that every young person trained has a place in the economy we are building.

• Massive Public Works and Infrastructure. The state must launch large-scale public investment to build the schools, clinics, roads, railways, irrigation schemes, housing and clean energy systems this country needs. These works must be built with local labour, local materials and local contractors, and they must put our young people to work at a decent wage.

How will this be paid for? By keeping more of Zambia’s wealth in Zambia. Our mineral wealth must work first for the Zambian people, not for distant shareholders. A people’s state that controls a fair share of its own resources does not need to beg private capital to create its jobs.

The status quo offers the youth of Zambia nothing but underemployment, insecurity and exclusion. The World Bank has now confirmed the scale of what is coming. The Socialist Party offers a serious, people-centred alternative that puts human dignity before private profit.