While the country suffers a chronic shortage of skilled workers to reach its 6% targeted GDP growth rate, in 2005 there were 200 000 unemployed graduates in South Africa, a professor of economics at the University of Cape Town (UCT) said on Friday.

Further, 40 000 of this group had university degrees, but still could not find employment, professor Haroon Bhorat, said at a Steel and Engineering Industries Federation of South Africa function, in Johannesburg.

Flying in the face of government’s black-economic empowerment drive, was the fact that 85% of unemployed graduates were black, with one-quarter of all black graduates unable to find work, he added.

This was compared to the just-over-5% of white graduates that could not find jobs in 2005, said Bhorat, who is also a UCT Development Policy Unit director.

He stated that the high level of unemployed graduates could be attributed to the types of qualifications that the graduates had, as well as their fields of study.

An official working with government’s skills growing initiative, Joint Initiative for Priority Skills Acquisition (Jipsa), Gwede Mantashe, offered a similar argument, saying that many black students pursued degrees in the arts, while the majority of students getting degrees in high-demand areas, such as engineering, were white.

Bhorat also questioned whether the South African industry discriminated racially or against historically black institutions.

He said that there was also a significant problem with ‘soft’ skills and work readiness, including communication skills, emotional intelligence and work experience.