The lights are on. The factories are closing. And government is running out of time. 

South Africa’s latest QLFS offers the kind of headline politicians love and economists dread. The official unemployment rate fell 0.5 percentage points to 31.4% in Q4 2025. Champagne, however, would be premature. 

The improvement owes less to job creation than to a shrinking labour force — 128,000 people simply stopped being counted because they stopped looking for work. Discouraged jobseekers swelled by 233,000 to 3.7 million. Youth unemployment rose to 43.8%. Only 44,000 net jobs were created in the quarter. In a country with a broad unemployment rate well over 40%, this is not progress. It is managed decline. Manufacturing shed 61,000 jobs. Trade shed 98,000. Mining lost a further 5,000. 

Which makes Eskom’s achievement all the more cruelly ironic. South Africa has recorded 278 consecutive days without load-shedding, with a mere 26 hours of interruptions this financial year. Some 3,181MW of Eskom’s generation capacity sits in cold reserve. The electricity crisis has been substantially resolved — yet electricity tariffs remain globally uncompetitive after rising over 1000% since 2003. That surplus power is not translating into economic activity. It is sitting idle while factories close. 

The steel sector is in crisis. ArcelorMittal’s shutdown of its long steel division placed nearly 4,000 workers at immediate risk, with SEIFSA warning that up to 293,000 direct and indirect jobs could be lost within five years. NUMSA has demanded a competitive tariff of 62 cents per kWh for energy-intensive smelters — arguing, correctly, that government is effectively exporting jobs by charging uncompetitive rates while sitting on surplus capacity. 

Then there is Tongaat Hulett. Last week, the 134-year-old sugar giant filed for provisional liquidation — the culmination of failed rescue proceedings, a collapsed sale agreement, and a surge of cheap sugar imports that displaced over R1 billion of domestic production in a single season. Some 15,446 sugarcane farmers in KwaZulu-Natal face non-payment. South Africa cannot afford to keep losing industries at this pace. 

Reindustrialisation will not happen while energy costs make domestic production globally uncompetitive. A structured reduction in industrial electricity tariffs — targeted at high job-absorption sectors like agro-processing and metals — would do more for employment than almost any other single lever available to the state. The grid can support it. The political will remains the missing variable. 

For businesses watching this unfold, the lesson is clear: government responds to pressure, but only when it is organised, sustained, and strategically applied. Public relations and strategic communications are no longer a back-office function — they are a survival strategy.  

The electricity is on. The question is whether government will use this hard-won stability to rebuild an industrial base — or preside over its quiet dismantling, one liquidation at a time. The time for politely worded submissions has passed. Businesses that understand what is at stake must make their voices impossible to ignore. 

– Mauritz Venter
Account Manager