By Thabo Ndlovu

At 42, I have started to feel that I belong to an age group that South Africa does not
quite know what to do with. I am not young, at least not according to most
programmes aimed at employment, entrepreneurship or skills development, but I am
also nowhere near pension age. I am simply somewhere in the middle, expected to
work, provide, support others and remain economically productive, while finding
fewer and fewer doors open to me.

I have qualifications. I have work experience. I have managed teams, met deadlines,
written reports, worked with budgets and spent years building the kind of experience
I was once told would make me employable. Then I lost my job during Covid. At first,
I thought unemployment would be temporary. I updated my CV, contacted former
colleagues and applied for positions, confident that experience would count for
something. Five years later, every door feels closed. What I have become
increasingly aware of is how often opportunity in South Africa is organised around
youth.

Youth employment programmes, youth entrepreneurship funds, youth internships,
youth development grants, youth skills initiatives and youth business support
dominate the language of economic inclusion. Young South Africans face an
unemployment crisis that should concern all of us. A country cannot afford to have
millions of young people entering adulthood with no meaningful path into the
economy, and there is good reason for government, business and civil society to
focus attention there. But there is another group that rarely enters the conversation:
people like me, adults who are still of working age but no longer qualify as youth and
are too young for a pension.

There is an assumption that by the time you reach your late thirties or forties, you
should already have made it. You should have a career, savings, perhaps own
something, and have built enough experience and networks to survive whatever
comes next. For many South Africans, turning 36 can feel like a crisis because you
suddenly fall off the edge of the support system. The programmes that once
described you as someone worth developing begin to disappear, even though your
economic position may be no more secure than it was the year before.

Some people spend years moving between short-term contracts. Others lose jobs
when companies close or restructure, or discover that the industries in which they

built their careers no longer exist in quite the same way. Some have spent years
raising children or caring for relatives. Others studied later in life or simply had the
misfortune of trying to build a career in an economy that does not produce enough
work. None of these realities disappears because someone has crossed an
administrative definition of youth.

By the time you are in your forties, unemployment often comes with greater
responsibility rather than less. A 42-year-old unemployed person may be carrying an
entire household: school fees, rent, food and transport for children, an elderly parent
who needs medication, a younger sibling still studying, funeral policies, electricity
and debt accumulated during all the months when you believed the next job was just
around the corner. This is what gets lost when we speak about unemployment
primarily through the language of youth. Age changes not only your employment
prospects, but also the weight of being unemployed.

At 22, unemployment can be terrifying because your adult life has not yet properly
begun. At 42, it can be terrifying because so many other lives are already attached to
yours. You are no longer only wondering what will happen to you; you are worrying
about what happens to everyone who depends on you if you cannot find a way back
into work.
Yet the social support available to working-age adults in this position is extremely
thin. For many, the Social Relief of Distress grant is one of the few forms of direct
support available. R350 matters when you have nothing, and I would never dismiss
what even that amount can mean in a household with no income, but the
contradiction is difficult to ignore. Society continues to treat me as an adult with
responsibilities. I must provide for my family, pay my bills and continue looking for
work. At the same time, many of the programmes designed to help someone re-
enter economic life tell me that I am too old.
Too old for the internship, too old for the youth fund, too old for the training
programme, too old for the enterprise competition, but apparently still young enough
to be expected to survive largely on my own.

I have started wondering what this will do to us politically. South Africa is already a
country organised around deep divisions of race, class, geography, gender and
nationality, but I wonder whether age is quietly becoming another one. Not an
obvious conflict yet, perhaps, but the beginnings of an age war in a society where
there are simply too few opportunities to go around. This is not because older
unemployed people necessarily resent young people. I certainly do not. My own
children will soon be entering this economy and I want them to have opportunities

that I did not have. The problem begins when support is structured as though
vulnerability belongs primarily to one stage of adult life, and opportunity is allowed to
move almost entirely in one direction.

A 35-year-old who has been unemployed for three years does not suddenly require
less support because she had a birthday. A 45-year-old retrenched factory worker
does not become easier to employ because he once had a job. A 50-year-old
woman who spent years doing unpaid care work and now needs an income cannot
solve that problem by simply waiting another decade for a pension. There is an
entire generation standing between youth policy and old-age support, carrying
responsibilities that the state and the economy continue to recognise while their
vulnerability is largely ignored.

Perhaps they remain invisible partly because, by this age, you are expected to cope
quietly. You become good at hiding financial trouble. You stop attending certain
gatherings because you cannot afford to contribute. You begin avoiding friends
because every invitation carries a cost. You become careful about which calls you
answer and, eventually, you may find yourself borrowing money from people you
once helped. You learn to say that “things are a bit slow at the moment” when what
you really mean is that you have no idea how you are going to make it through the
month.

Sometimes I read an advertisement and know that I could do the job well. I have the
experience, the qualifications and the maturity they are looking for, and then I reach
the line that says applicants must be youth. There is something deeply disorientating
about being considered experienced enough to carry responsibility but too old to be
developed.

What happens when enough people begin to feel this way. Scarcity inevitably
creates comparison. Why did that person get the opportunity and not me? Why is
government helping them and not us? Why are resources directed towards one
generation when another is also struggling? Those questions can very quickly
become resentment, even when the person receiving the opportunity is not
responsible for the system that excluded you.
A 25-year-old receiving an internship has not taken something that rightfully
belonged to me. She is trying to survive the same economy. But when opportunities
are so scarce, policy can unintentionally turn people who should understand one
another’s struggles into competitors. The unemployed 24-year-old and the
unemployed 44-year-old are not each other’s problem. They are evidence of the

same problem: an economy that does not create enough secure routes into work, or
enough ways back in once someone has fallen out.
Perhaps this is where our thinking about unemployment needs to change. We often
treat it as a problem that happens at the beginning of adulthood, something that
must be solved by giving young people their first chance. But unemployment can
happen again and again over the course of a life: after retrenchment, illness, the
collapse of an industry, the end of a contract, the failure of a business or years spent
caring for someone else. Economic life is not a straight line, and our policies should
not assume that it is. People need more than one point of entry into work. They
need a way back after something has gone wrong.

We are right to talk about giving young people a first chance, but a functioning
society must also know how to give people a second chance, and sometimes a third.
Otherwise we risk creating a strange form of economic abandonment in which
people reach their most productive years, carrying their greatest responsibilities, and
discover that they have somehow aged out of being worth investing in.

At 42, I am not asking to be called young. I am asking why becoming older has made
me less visible to a country that still expects me to work, provide and participate fully
in its economy. Somewhere between 35 and pension age, there are millions of
people who have not stopped needing opportunity simply because policy has
stopped calling them youth.