I have given myself a new title: job creator. Well, attempted job creator.

I spent yesterday afternoon haggling at the flower market in the City Deep, Jo’burg’s market precinct. Wilson, one of the homeless guys I work with is starting a small business, selling roses at the traffic lights.

Unemployment is chronic in South Africa. In Johannesburg it’s 32 per cent, so entrepreneurship and job creation are buzzwords. Don’t try and touch the pump in the petrol station: there’s an army of trained attendants to do it for you. At the supermarket there’s one person to scan your items and another to pack them into bags – and when you get to the car park you car guard will happily unpack your bags for you.

Around government offices there is a micro-economy of queue-waiters, photograph-takers and people to help you fill out your forms. If you decide to wait in a queue – it can take hours – there’ll be people selling iceblocks, Cokes or roasted peanuts to keep you going. If you need a folder to put your documents in, there’ll be someone to sell you one.

But the most ingenious – and most ubiquitous – entrepreneurs are the robot salesmen. In South Africa, a traffic light is a robot, and when you pull up at an intersection there’ll be a range of people to sell you things through your car window. There’s always the usual stuff like newspapers, but these salesmen are savvy. In summer they’ll sell cold drinks or battery-powered fans. On freezing cold winter days they have gloves and beanies.

And sometimes they just sell weird things. At the nearest big intersection near my house one man is regularly selling hand puppets that squawk when you squeeze their beaks. I’ve been tempted to buy one so that when he approaches me to sell one I can grab mine from my glove box and scare him.  Or you can get huge furry black spiders about fifty centimetres in diameter. But the best thing of all? Bunny scarves. You’ve never seen anything so funny. Basically, it’s a big, furry scarf with a bunny head at the end. And the salesman – no doubt, a fashion-savvy guy – was wearing a pink one as a sample. I’ll get one if I see him again.

Wilson has just turned up again to finish tying the ribbons on his roses so he can start selling them tonight in the evening peak hour. If he can manage to sell each rose for R10 ($A2) then he can make R5 profit on each one. Once he’s sold all 20, he can reinvest and sell more roses.  He’s excited: he wants to buy an iron for his family and start saving for bricks to build himself a room to stay in. And then maybe a guitar.

The Good Samaritan binds his neighbour’s wounds, gives him food and a place to stay for a few days. Then what? Lends him some money so that he can start working and make his life liveable again? That’s what I’m trying to work out.