The hand-wringing over South Africa’s unemployment “ticking time bomb” (The Mercury’s front-page headline of March 31) overlooks the most basic cause of this tragic situation: socialism is the parent of unemployment. Thanks to their promotion of disinvestment, sanctions and economic sabotage, the ANC inherited an economy in 1994 which already had four million unemployed. Ever since then the figure has ballooned to way beyond ten million. Besides fundamental incompetence exhibited at every aspect of governance, deliberate marginalisation of the only sector that creates employment – private enterprise – has been core ANC policy. Driven by inflexible labour laws, enforced demographic representivity, radical economic transformation and now outright “majority rule,” as KZN Commissar Sihle Zikalala prescribes, the economic state of the country adheres