EDITORIAL: Check election jobs promises
Are parties willing to do what it really takes to transform the economy and tackle the unemployment crisis?
15 January 2024 - 05:00
On the eve of SA’s 2019 general election, the official unemployment rate was already one of the world’s highest at 27.6%. Five years on, the unemployment rate is more than four percentage points higher at 31.9%. That’s a big improvement on the 34% plus unemployment peak in the Covid-19 pandemic’s darkest days. But it was only in the third quarter of 2023 that total employment finally returned to its pre-Covid level of about 16.5-million.
Youth unemployment is still sky high at almost 60%. Only four in 10 adult South Africans are in any sort of employment, the official statistics show...
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