experienced labour shortages. Nattrass (1996:46; 2001) notes that in response to this challenge the South African government used coercive measures to ensure cheap labour to meet the demands of industry, mines, and commercial farms. Development driven by gold revenues and foreign capital ensured a consistent flow of labour away from traditional agriculture in favour of rapid urbanization (Nattrass 1996:46; Stander 1996). But this growth ground to a halt in the mid-1970s when the gold boom burst and effectively lost its luster. By the late 1970s unemployment had taken hold such that by 1994, one third of the African labour force was simply unable to find work. From the mid-1920s South Africa’s industrialisation strategy mirrored that of Latin America with a strong inward focus. Initially, this strategy supported labour-intensive industries but slowly began losing steam by the 1960s. Unlike the East Asian economies, who at that time adopted a more outward-orientated export approach, South Africa closed in with heavier protectionist measures and a capital-intensive industry approach. These developments, together with negative real interest rates and large-scale strategic investments such as Sasol, made for a lethal concoction of rising capital intensity. The net result is that economy became increasingly more capital intensive at the expense of labour intensity. The issue of employment creation is a hotly contested one in South African politics. Twenty years after democracy, it is still the election-dominating card, and the priority of national, provincial and municipal card. In fact, amongst the biggest and most visible political parties, the promise to create jobs is at the top of their election manifestos. ‘We have created 3.7million work opportunities over the past 5years’ ‘ Zuma, State of the Nation 2014 ‘The manifest we release today is a manifesto for jobs’ ‘ Helen Zille, Leader of opposition Democratic Alliance. Without getting into the political semantics it is important to heed Bhora’s (2003) cautions that we must understand the absolute expansion of employment within context. More simply, the number of jobs that have been created must be understood against the number of new entrants that have come into the labour market over the same period. For example, between 1995 and 2002: 1.6million jobs were created. However, 5 million new entrants entered the labour market over the same period. The inability of the labour force to absorb new entrants in addition to the graduate unemploy