“Tell no lies, claim no easy victories,” said Amilcar Cabral – words our leaders should heed when discussing unemployment in South Africa.

South Africa’s unemployment crisis is not best understood by looking at quarterly fluctuations – especially not when it has been defined by persistent, compounding failure.

If, instead, we count all jobless people (whether or not they are actively searching), the picture becomes clearer. On this expanded definition, unemployment stood at 42% at the beginning of 2024. By the end of 2025, it was 42.1% – a figure statistically indistinguishable from a year earlier. At best, the crisis has stabilised at an extraordinarily high level.

The absolute numbers tell a more revealing story still.

Since the formation of the GNU in June 2024, the total number of employed people has increased by 153 000. But, because the labour market grew by nearly 330,000, the number of unemployed people has increased by more than 170 000. In other words, fewer than half of those who have entered the labour market since 2024 have found work.

GNU employment growth has not reduced unemployment. At best, it has slowed its rate of increase.

‘The long arc is sobering’

Step back further and the trend becomes unmistakable. Today, nearly 12.5 million people who would like to work cannot find employment. Less than 41% of workingage adults have jobs — far below the peak of just over 46% reached more than 17 years ago in 2008.

Even then, that number was low by international standards. In middle-income economies, employment levels averaged around 60% of the adult population. With 41% of the working-age population being employed, South Africa’s labour market fails most adults.

The long arc is sobering. In the second quarter of 2019, just after Ramaphosa’s first full year in office, the number of people willing and able to work but without employment reached 10 million for the first time.

That devastating milestone reflected years of economic mismanagement and governance failure under the Zuma administration. But, and it’s a big but, since then, the tide has not turned. By the end of December 2025, the number had increased by a quarter and now stands at just under 12.5 million.

Translate that into time. Since the beginning of 2018, roughly 1 000 additional people have joined the ranks of the unemployed each day. That is the equivalent of adding a small town to the unemployment queue every month and a minor city every year. Against that backdrop, a quarterly dip in the narrow rate is barely visible.

We should be long past thinking that this is a temporary shock that will correct itself. Unemployment is deeply entrenched, structural and relentless.

Since 2008, the number of people unemployed for longer than a year has risen from 2.5 million to 6.2 million. Unemployment in South Africa is no longer a phase; it is a near-permanent condition because the longer people remain excluded from the labour market, the harder it becomes to return.

This is especially true for the large cohort of 3.3 million unemployed people who have never had a job.

In this context, the expansion of Public Employment Programmes (PEPs), again promised in the latest State of the Nation address, cannot alter the underlying trajectory.

Such programmes involve short-term “work opportunities” that mainly involve three- to four-month employment stints.

Overall, they may provide temporary relief for some, with a few hundred thousand people employed on PEPs each day. However, it is important to recognise that they cannot meaningfully absorb millions in an economy that generates too few market-based jobs.

Bold alternatives needed

Strikingly, far more political energy has been devoted to discrete projects and targeted youth initiatives, each of which creates a limited number of positions, than to the structural reforms required to generate millions of sustainable jobs. What South Africa faces is not a project gap but a growth gap.

In addition to the many changes required to achieve much faster growth, the country needs a more labour-absorbing economy, and this requires confronting choices that have been repeatedly postponed.

The first choice is the cost and risk of hiring inexperienced workers by removing the automatic extension of bargaining council agreements to non-signatories (small firms, small town and rural firms, new firms) and allowing for probation periods of up to 12 months for all new hires, regardless of job complexity.

The second choice requires dismantling a skills bureaucracy that has failed to deliver people with employable capabilities, this means closing the Sector Education and Training Authorities (SETAs), not reforming and reducing them as the President prevaricated in the recent SONA.

The third area for action is that the country must create a far more predictable and much less burdensome regulatory environment, particularly for small and medium enterprises.

South Africa’s political leaders need to be honest about the reality we face. Stability at 42% unemployment is not progress. A half-percentage-point quarterly movement does not signal a turning point. It suggests, rather, that we are walking in circles. It is no more than a ripple. The PEPs are no more than sandbags against a deepening flood.

The country’s long-term trend remains one of deterioration: more people excluded, more long-term scarring and more daily additions to the unemployment queue. South Africa has more people unemployed today than at the start of the Ramaphosa presidency or the start of the GNU.

Pretending otherwise will not create a single job. Nor will it make the enormous personal, political and economic costs of our catastrophic unemployment any less destabilising.

Ann Bernstein is head of the Centre for Development and Enterprise.

This article was published on News24