This week, Statistics South Africa reported that the official unemployment rate has climbed to 33.6%. That means 8.5 million people who want work cannot find it. Among young people, the figure is 47.4%, very nearly one in two. On the broader measure, which also includes those who have stopped looking for work, more than four in ten working-age adults are without meaningful employment.
Numbers on this scale can stop meaning very much after a while, which is part of the problem. But there is no challenge facing South Africa that is not made worse by unemployment. And none can be solved while it persists. It sits beneath every other problem we face: crime, inequality, social instability, pressure on the fiscus and the slow erosion of hope in a generation that should be our greatest asset. It is, without serious rival, public enemy number one.
And yet, for reasons written deep into our history, our geography and our widening social divisions, we are a country that is easily distracted. We allow ourselves to become animated by sideshows, imported culture wars, manufactured outrage, and the egos and ambitions of certain political leaders who have discovered that noise is cheaper than delivery. We spend our national attention on the theatre and starve the substance. It is a luxury a country with our unemployment rate simply cannot afford.
If one voice needs to be louder and clearer in all of this, it is business. Ultimately, business, not government, is the engine of growth and therefore of jobs. Government does not create sustainable employment. It creates the conditions in which employment is created, or it fails to. Too often, though, business is treated as a suspect rather than a partner. There persists, among too much of our political elite, a curious and self-defeating distrust of the private sector, as though profit and the public good are opposed, rather than the second depending in large part on the first. That suspicion plays out in ideological battles that would be merely tedious if they were not so costly. Business, for its part, should not apologise for what it is. It needs to be firm, bold and unashamed in making the case that it is the principal engine of the growth, and the jobs, this country so desperately needs.
The single most important condition business asks for in return is certainty: the confidence of an investor, local or foreign, that the rules will hold, that property is secure, that the lights and water will work, and that government will apply the rules fairly.
Measured against that test, too much of our recent policy debate has pointed the wrong way. The National Health Insurance and the Expropriation Bill have injected uncertainty at exactly the moment we needed to project stability. Add to that endemic crime, the visible collapse of services in too many municipalities, and a schooling system that is not equipping young people for the world of ten years ago, let alone a world being remade faster than we can quite imagine by artificial intelligence and automation. Each of these is, in the end, a jobs problem. Every one of them quietly tells capital to wait, or to go elsewhere. And when capital waits, it is the young person looking for a first job who pays for it.
The answer is not what it is so often assumed to be. It is not another investor summit, another indaba, or another framework signed to applause and quietly abandoned. We have had enough talk shops to last a generation. The answer is duller and harder than that: getting the basics right.
Deliver the services, water, power, roads, rail and ports, that make a place worth investing in. Educate and train South Africans for the economy of 2026 and the decades beyond it, not the one we grew up in. And find the collective discipline to stop being pulled into distractions of no substance.
None of this is naïve optimism. We already have proof that it works. Some of the most encouraging progress of recent years has come precisely where the state has been willing to work with the private sector rather than against it: in the steadying of our energy supply, in the early reform of Home Affairs, and in the slow reopening of our freight rail and ports. These are green shoots of progress, and they show what becomes possible the moment ideological suspicion is set aside and the public and private sectors pull in the same direction. That cooperation now needs to be accelerated and intensified, deliberately and while the momentum lasts.
That last point matters more than it appears to. Focus is a national resource, and we squander it. The countries that have lifted millions out of poverty within a single generation did so not because they were cleverer than us, but because they refused to be diverted from the one thing that mattered most. We, by contrast, have recent and painful experience of how easily a real problem can be crowded out by a manufactured one.
Eight and a half million people are waiting for us to remember what the emergency actually is. Everything else, however loud, is a sideshow.
– Paul Boughey
Chief Executive Officer