Image credit: Stats SA
The Statistics of South Africa (Stats SA) recently announced the unemployment rate in the country for the first quarter of the year, and it revealed that the unemployment rates of the Eastern Cape and Mpumalanga provinces have increased by 49.3% and 49%, respectively.
The overall unemployment rate of South Africa has increased by 1%, from 31.9% to 32.9%, which does not sound too bad in theory, as it only surpasses economists’ predictions by just 0.2%. However, this number includes the thousands of recent graduates and matriculants who are looking to enter the job market.
The youth unemployment rate has reportedly increased to over 150,000 in the first quarter of 2025, to 4.8 million. In other words, the youth unemployment rate has gone from 44.6% to 46.1% over the span of the final quarter of 2024 to the first quarter of 2025.
According to former Statistician General, Dr Pali Lehohla, there are two main factors contributing to the unemployment rate and overall poverty in South Africa. The primary factor he puts forward is how the government has failed to come up with ‘result-driven approaches’, which has resulted in what he calls a ‘haemorrhage in jobs’.
The second factor he puts forward as the main driver of up to 60% of the poverty in the country is the ‘lack of post-high school education’ within Black and Coloured communities, which only totals up to approximately 10%. This figure is staggeringly low in comparison to the almost 70% overall average of Indian and White communities who have pursued tertiary education.
In addition to Mpumalanga and the Eastern Cape’s unemployment rates increasing, Stats SA has indicated that KwaZulu-Natal, Northern Cape, as well as Limpopo are all on the threshold.As it stands right now, the only provinces that have shown an increase in the employment rate are the Free State, Gauteng, as well as the Western Cape, which has reported an increase in employment of almost 50,000, with an extended measure of unemployment to below 25%.
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