S.Africa's youth battling for work

Daveyton, South Africa, Mar. 18: In a corner of his mother’s backyard, 30-year-old Thabang Moshoke runs a clipper through a client's hair at a makeshift barbershop that has only a rough roof to shield it from the skies.

A queue of men and boys wait their turn for a 60-rand ($3.50) trim from this self-taught barber, who defied South Africa's massive unemployment rate -- one of the highest in the world -- to create his own job.

Moshoke turned his schoolboy hobby of hairstyling into a career when he became among the 32 percent who are today out of work in South Africa, a rate that rises to 45 percent for the 15 to 34 age group.

He lost his last job, as a petrol attendant, during the pandemic several years ago. "Covid-19 sparked the realisation that I could turn this whole thing into a career, and I've been moving forward ever since," said Moshoke.

Now he works six days a week, from 8:00 am to 6:00 pm, making around 5,000 rand ($274) a month, an amount on par with the official minimum wage.

"This is not an easy job," he said, his reddened eyes revealing deep fatigue. But, "we have hands and at the end of the day, you have to sleep with a full tummy."

In his small patch of the yard of his boyhood home in Johannesburg's sprawling township of Daveyton, Moshoke also provides space for other young entrepreneurs, such as 25-year-old Thuso Sebiloane, who set himself up as a nail technician when he could not find work.

"We also want to grow as black people since opportunities were never on our side in this country," Sebiloane, who styles and shapes customers' nails, told AFP.

Three decades after the end of apartheid, black South Africans still suffer the most from the legacy of the previous race-based system.(AFP)