There was a sentence at the 2026 Government Technical Advisory Centre (“GTAC”) Public Economics Conference that should be pinned above every Cabinet desk, municipal council chamber and departmental budget committee in South Africa: “South Africa’s biggest labour market challenge is not only preparing people for work, it is creating sufficient opportunities for people to work.”

That is the golden thread that ran through three days of evidence, argument and uncomfortable honesty. South Africa does not merely have a youth unemployment problem. It has an economy that does not absorb enough people, a state that too often funds activity rather than outcomes and a policy system that still behaves as though better training alone can solve a crisis of insufficient demand.

This matters constitutionally. Section 22 protects the freedom to choose a trade, occupation or profession. Section 10 protects dignity. Section 195 demands efficient, economical, accountable public administration. These rights do not promise every person a job tomorrow. But they do require a state that understands the scale of exclusion and uses public resources intelligently, transparently and in pursuit of real opportunity.

One of the clearest lessons from the conference was that growth is essential, but not enough. As one speaker put it, “growth is a necessary but insufficient condition for full employment.” That is not defeatism. It is arithmetic. If the economy grows without absorbing labour, if investment rises without reaching the townships, rural towns and young people furthest from opportunity, then growth will improve the graph while leaving the queue outside the labour centre exactly where it was.

The second lesson is that government must stop mistaking programmes for strategy. The review of active labour market programmes presented at the conference was sobering. South Africa has 43 programmes across 16 national departments, costing roughly R60 billion in 2024/25. Yet the system has “no unified theory of change”, no common metrics and too much spending on interventions that may improve employability without creating enough jobs. In plain English: we are often training people for vacancies that do not exist.

That is not a small administrative problem. It is, in fact, a constitutional problem of public finance. Every rand spent badly is a rand not spent on a classroom assistant, a working road, a safer trading space, a functioning market, or a programme that actually moves a young person from exclusion into income. The conference’s message was not that training is useless. It was that training without demand is like polishing keys for doors that have not been built.

The Jobs Fund offered a more hopeful model. Its purpose, we were told, is not to “fund projects simply to spend money”, but “to learn about what works and to mobilise others to invest alongside us.” That is how public money should behave: not as a bucket poured into old channels, but as catalytic capital that tests, measures, learns and scales. The evidence presented on enterprise development suggested that targeted public funding, when matched by private and institutional partners, can crowd in investment and create measurable employment. The point is not that the Jobs Fund is a magic wand. The point is that it asks the right question: what does each public rand unlock?

The third lesson is that South Africa must look more honestly at the economy it already has. The conference repeatedly returned to the informal, township and rural economy, not as a sentimental footnote, but as a serious economic frontier. We heard of backyard rooms creating rental income, township auto mechanics servicing uninsured vehicles, schoolyard food sellers putting children through university, township malls outperforming expectations and informal construction driving demand in rural areas. One speaker captured the absurdity of our categories through the words of a woman who had sold outside a school for 26 years: “I work, but I do not have work.” That is South Africa in a sentence.

Our statistics, laws and municipal by-laws often fail to see this world clearly. Worse, local government frequently treats informal enterprise as a nuisance to be licensed, moved, fined or harassed, rather than as a livelihood system that needs water, electricity, safety, trading space, tenure security and fair rules. This is where the 2026 local government elections become directly relevant. Municipalities are not spectators in the unemployment crisis. They decide whether a trader can trade, whether a taxi rank becomes an economic node, whether a township business has electricity, whether a market is safe, whether zoning supports or suffocates livelihoods.

The fourth lesson is that dignity and flexibility must be held together. South Africa cannot build jobs by stripping workers of rights. The Constitution protects fair labour practices for a reason. But nor can we pretend that every micro-enterprise can carry the same compliance burden as a listed company. The challenge, as one quoted formulation put it, is a regulatory environment that is “firm on rights but flexible on formalisation.”

Finally, the conference reminded us that young people are not merely “job seekers”. They are whole people carrying transport costs, family duties, poor schooling, mental strain, weak networks and the slow humiliation of repeated rejection. The Basic Package of Support discussion was important precisely because it recognised that exclusion is multi-dimensional. A young person cannot simply be shouted into employability.

The lesson from GTAC 2026 is therefore not one neat policy slogan. It is a demand for a different governing habit: start with evidence, understand the real economy, measure what works, protect dignity, fix the places where opportunity is blocked and spend public money as though the Constitution requires results.

Because it does.

For more on this topic read: Growing Unemployment and the Constitutional Imperative for an Inclusive, Gender-Equal Economy – https://fwdeklerk.org/growing-unemployment-and-the-constitutional-imperative-for-an-inclusive-gender-equal-economy/