Written By: Matsheole Majoro
A young graduate from Soweto applies for hundreds of jobs and doesn’t hear anything back, while a matriculant with a family in a municipal office walk into a learnership by Monday. Both were raised in the same province, and both are very much capable yet only one of them gets a chance. The difference between them isn’t talent or ambition, but who they know.
This is how opportunities are allocated in too much of South Africa. They are allocated by connection, and patronage has slowly become the platform for the public sector and mostly of the private sector too. A tender is awarded to a nephew, a promotion goes to the loyalist, and a post is filled long before it is ever advertised.
The repercussions are that the commitment of equal opportunity has been abandoned. South Africans are told from a young age that education and hard work will be rewarded, and then they watch positions and employment offers flow through networks they could never access. The message is clear: your future depends on your surname and political affiliations and your proximity to power.
This is a moral and economic crisis; it is also a form of coercion. When access to work depends on the kindness of a gatekeeper, individual freedom is reduced, because choice becomes conditional. The person that doesn’t have connections is not just disadvantaged; they are excluded by a system that was supposed is to serve her.
Young people feel this most intensely, since they are the ones entering the labour market where experience is required but never offered, where internship is unofficially reserved and where public employment is usually used as a reward for political loyalty. South Africa does not just have an unemployment crisis; it has a distribution crisis, because work is not rare for lack of things to do, it is rare because the system for distributing opportunity has been captured.
Equality means equality before the law, not equality of outcome and that contrast is usually misread. Equal opportunity does not need identical results, but it does need that no one’s futures are decided by birth, connection or political affiliations. A free society tolerates unequal results manufactured by free choices, but it can’t put up with unequal access produced by gatekeeping.
Markets are not flawless and nepotism exists in private firms where family businesses choose family because networks are important in every economy on earth. What markets have, however is a remedial that patronage doesn’t, since competition penalises favouritism. A business that only employs relatives eventually fail to one that employs the best people available, and consumers don’t care who owns the company so much as who serves them better.
When the state is the main supplier of jobs, contracts and licenses, patronage has no opponent because there is no competitor to lose to and no consumer to walk away. The only way to limit patronage is therefore to limit the optional power that makes it possible.
This then proposes the reform agenda. Reduce the number of favours a politician can give by making public appointments competitive and transparent. Cut the licencing requirements that turn normal work into authorisation slip, because every licence terminated is a gatekeeper made unnecessary.
Equal opportunity also requires that entry into professions, trades and industries be as transparent as possible. When a licence, certificate or a committee determines who may work, the connected are advantaged and the excluded are punished, so decontrol is not a gift to business but to the people with talent and no contracts.
Public hiring should be opened to outside competition, with neutral panels and audited selection processes, so that appointments are not quietly organised behind closed doors. Where the state should issue licenses, it should be obliged to publish every application, every approval and every rejection. Tender processes must be available to the widest pool of bidders, with no optional shortlisting and no political involvement in awarding contracts.
The same rationale applies to state-owned enterprises, which stay among the largest patronage networks in the county. Their procurement, hiring, and promotion decisions should be liable to independent audit and public scrutiny. Skills should be recognised through voluntary certification and industry bodies rather than state-issued permits that stop entry. Learnerships, work-integrated training should be broadened through private partnerships, so that young people can create networks stemming from demonstrated competence rather than political affiliation.
All of this requires less government discretion and more transparency and a rejection to treat the state as a source of spoils.
There is a personal aspect that warrants honesty. In a network where connections decide so much, it is enticing to conclude that effort is pointless and that conclusion is exactly what patronage hinges on. Every young person who learns a skill, keeps a reputation and delivers quality work is creating a system based on merit instead of access and that is a form of resistance available to everyone.
The gap between who deserves an opportunity and who receives one is the characterising inequality in South Africa, but it is not certain. It is the result of settling about how authority and favours are allocated, so minimising that authority and opening that process would make the country a place where your future depends on what you can do rather than who you happen to know.
This is the minimum prerequisite of a free society, and a country that rewards connection over ability will eventually run out of both.
Matsheole Majoro is a final year student and an Associate of the Free Market Foundation.