Youth unemployment must be declared a national disaster

IT IS a melancholy fact that the most profound failures of democratic capitalism often manifest not as sudden collapses, but as slow, grinding tragedies of exclusion.

- NYIKO ASHLEY MABASA

Nowhere is this structural pathology more blatantly illuminated today than in South Africa. More than three decades after the formal end of apartheid, the country is grappling with an economic malaise that threatens not just its social fabric, but the very stability of its democratic experiment. The statistics are not merely sobering; they are a profound indictment of the post-1994 economic settlement. With a headline unemployment rate hovering around 34%, and youth unemployment soaring to an astonishing 60.8%, South Africa possesses the dubious distinction of having one of the most dysfunctional labour markets on the planet. This is not merely a cyclical fluctuation that a modest fiscal stimulus might cure. It is a deep-seated, structural crisis that has persisted for decades.

Indeed, the youth unemployment rate has risen by over 18 percentage points since 1991. If one uses the expanded definition, which rightly includes those who have abandoned the futile search for work, the number of unemployed has more than tripled since 1994, rising from 3.7 million to a staggering 12.6 million. The country’s employment-to-population ratio stands at a dismal 39%, one of the lowest in the world, trailing even nations like Egypt and Tiirkiye. This chronic failure to integrate its young population into the productive economy has profound implications that extend far beyond mere economic inefficiency. It is a primary driver of the country’s endemic social crisis, fuelling crime, violence, and a pervasive sense of hopelessness that corrodes the foundations of civil society.