About this site

This resource is hosted by the Nelson Mandela Foundation, but was compiled and authored by Padraig O’Malley. It is the product of almost two decades of research and includes analyses, chronologies, historical documents, and interviews from the apartheid and post-apartheid eras.

The underclass as a 'time bomb'

In May 2005 a security and intelligence conference in Pretoria hosted by the National Intelligence Coordinating Committee which was attended by attended by the intelligence agencies, government, big business and civil society and academics agreed that the biggest challenge facing SA national security was the 'time-bomb' of social conflict driven by a permanent underclass of educated but unemployed youth who face a future that offers little. Chief Economist of COSATU, Dr Neva Makgetla, told the conference that 60 percent of South Africans under the age of 30 had never had a job and that even among the employed between 1995 and 2004 as many as 40 percent earned less than R1000 ($153)  a month. The average unemployed black person had 4 years of secondary education post primary. Southern African Report 27 May 2005

This resource is hosted by the Nelson Mandela Foundation, but was compiled and authored by Padraig O’Malley. Return to theThis resource is hosted by the site.