Every June 16, we tell young people that education is power.
We remind them of the courage of the youth of 1976, who stood against an oppressive system and demanded dignity through learning.
We speak proudly of sacrifice, resilience and the belief that education would become the great equaliser in a democratic South Africa.
But perhaps a harder and more uncomfortable question we must ask today is this: Power to do what?
Because for many young South Africans, education no longer guarantees what it once promised.
The painful truth is that SA does not simply have an unemployment crisis. It has a pathway crisis.
We have created a generation that followed the rules, yet increasingly feels stranded by them.
For years, young people were taught a singular formula: Go to school. Study hard. Get a qualification. Find a job. Build a life.
For many families, especially in township communities, education represented more than schooling — it represented escape.
Escape from poverty. Escape from exclusion. Escape from the indignity their parents and grandparents endured. And to be fair, this belief did not emerge from nowhere.
Lazy? Think again
For the generation shaped by the struggles of 1976 and the democratic transition, employment was the clearest route to stability. The economy they entered, despite its inequalities, still had relatively visible pathways. The government hired, and corporates recruited at scale.
A stable job could sustain a household. Entrepreneurship, particularly in Black communities, was rarely positioned as the primary route to economic participation.
People were taught to survive systems, not own them, and even less create them.
So our parents gave us advice that made sense for the economy they knew: “Go to school so you can get a good job.”
The problem now is that the economy changed faster than the advice.
Today, millions of young people are discovering that qualifications no longer guarantee economic mobility.
In fact, many enter adulthood carrying a burden no previous generation carried at this scale: educational exhaustion without economic certainty.
Consider: A young person studies for years. Completes a diploma or degree. Finally secures an internship earning R5,000 or R6,000 a month if fortunate.
Transport alone takes a meaningful chunk out of that.
At home, family expectations begin immediately. Younger siblings need support. Parents are struggling. Society quietly pressures them to “look successful” before they actually are.
This is why accounts are opened. Debt begins before wealth.
And before long, many young people find themselves financially trapped right at the beginning of adulthood.
Yet somehow, we continue calling them lazy.
This is not to say there are no young people lacking discipline or urgency. That would be dishonest.
But perhaps what we dismiss too quickly as laziness is often something deeper: economic fatigue.
What happens to motivation when effort repeatedly produces uncertainty? When the promised destination never arrives?
A young person who sees graduates unemployed, internships leading nowhere and overqualified people struggling to survive may not be lazy. They may simply be disillusioned.
Pathways from learning to earning
Perhaps nowhere is our contradiction more visible than in how we treat skills.
In many township communities, artisanal and technical careers like plumbing, welding, carpentry, electrical work, refrigeration, mechanics, bricklaying are quietly looked down upon.
Too often, they are framed as fallback options rather than respected professions. Young people even grow up hearing some version of: “Study so you don’t become that.”
Yet while the unemployed graduate sits at home, the electrician write invoices, the welder takes on more staff, the artisan owns tools, solves problems, consolidates a widening network.
This is not an argument against education.
Education matters deeply. But isn’t it time to say out loud that SA has unintentionally created a cultural hierarchy where qualifications are respected more than practical competence, even when the labour market cries out for the latter, and increasingly rewards it.
And this is where we must challenge another uncomfortable reality.
In many sectors of township and informal economies, from construction and tailoring to mechanics, repairs and small technical services, others identified opportunity gaps that many South Africans had overlooked or undervalued.
While some chased credentials in an economy with shrinking absorption capacity, others built livelihoods around practical services the market desperately needs.
That should not trigger blame. It should trigger reflection. What exactly are we preparing young people for?
Because if education produces qualifications without employability, and aspiration without pathways, then frustration becomes inevitable.
Perhaps the question for June 16 is no longer whether education matters.
It is whether we have been honest with young people about what meaningful economic participation actually looks like in modern SA.
Maybe the future requires us to restore dignity to skilled trades. To rethink apprenticeships.
To build stronger pathways between learning and earning.
To stop treating technical skills as lesser than academic ones. To expose young people earlier to ownership, enterprise and practical competence.
Most importantly, perhaps we need to stop selling outdated promises.
Because perhaps the greatest betrayal of SA’s youth is not unemployment itself.
It is continuing to promise pathways we know no longer exist.
Buzani is a business consultant and youth empowerment advocate, as well as a founding member of an award-winning SME and of the vibrant Mdantsane entrepreneur network Kasi Konversations