Today, we need to talk about what the government is doing and what it is not doing while your generation waits.

BBBEE.

While 45.8% of South Africa's youth cannot find sustained work.

While 10.6 million of your peers are entirely outside the labour force.

While R80 billion of the youth budget flows annually through a youth development system that is not interested in creating job opportunities for you.

The government's legislative energy is directed at revising Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment.

Again.

Futhi.

Hape.

Nog.

Not building a new pathway for youth employment.

Not interrogating what many years of spending billions has actually produced for youth in communities like yours.

Not developing new mechanisms to address a crisis that worsens with every quarterly labour force survey published.

The government's response to the most severe youth unemployment crisis in South Africa's democratic history is to revise the compliance framework, BBBEE.

Let us be honest about what that choice means.

BBBEE is a painkiller.

Not a cure.

Its architecture says: we will attract companies and investors to South Africa, and we will require them to demonstrate transformation compliance as a condition of operating here.

It does not say: we will invest so deeply and deliberately in our own youth that they become the builders, owners, and governors of this economy from within.

There is a profound difference between those two visions.

One asks an external company for permission to participate in one's own economic future.

One builds the indigenous economic power and sovereign capability that makes external investment a choice, not an economic lifeline we cannot survive without.

Now look at what BBBEE has produced after many years of implementation.

Have you seen a BBBEE beneficiary who is genuinely angry about the state of our economy?

Most are cordial.

Softened.

Comfortable at the table of compliance.

They have been tamed to the point of forgetting that the point of transformation was not to secure a seat at someone else's table.

It was to own the table.

To own the building the table is in.

To own the economy that the building serves.

To create and lead new industries.

Instead, many have become dependent on the goodwill of the very companies the policy was meant to transform.

They receive what is offered.

They do not demand what is owed.

BBBEE, in its current form, has turned liberation anger into compliance gratitude.

BBBEE is a paracetamol.

And our youth don’t need paracetamol.

Just like the ‘76 generation, they need the anger, bitterness and a resolute attitude to fight for the domination of our economy.

And compliance gratitude does not rebuild economies.

It maintains them in the hands of those who built them at our expense.

The 1976 generation did not receive a compliance framework.

They received a system designed to permanently exclude them.

And they used their anger to dismantle it.

Not a softened, managed and pain-relieved anger.

Raw, clarifying, strategic and community-rooted anger.

The anger that comes from knowing exactly what is being done to you and refusing to pretend it is acceptable.

Your generation carries a version of that same anger.

You feel it every time you finish a training programme and go home to the same unemployment.

Every time you read that R80 billion was spent in your name and you cannot account for a single rand of it in your life.

Every time a government department launches another youth programme with the same fanfare and the same absence of results in employment creation.

Do not medicate that anger.

Do not let anyone soften it into compliance.

That anger is not a problem.

That anger is information.

That anger is the beginning of the same clarity that produced June 16, 1976.

The generation of 1976 did not fight for a South Africa that would spend its sovereignty negotiating transformation percentages with multinational corporations.

They fought for a South Africa whose own children would own its future.

We have drifted very far from that vision.

Today: hold your anger.

It has work to do.