South Africa faces a national emergency in unemployment, demanding urgent action beyond mere summits. As President Cyril Ramaphosa prepares to address another talk shop on this crisis, we must question whether five million jobs in ten years is truly sufficient.
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South Africa does not have a normal unemployment problem.
It has a national emergency.
That is the first truth that must frame this week’s debate at the "On The Record" summit in Cape Town, where President Cyril Ramaphosa is expected to address the jobs crisis. Any serious platform that puts unemployment at the centre of national discussion is welcome. The country needs that conversation. But let us be frank from the outset: if the summit’s headline ambition is to create five million jobs in ten years, then it is starting from a target that is politically attractive, mathematically inadequate, and strategically underpowered.
Five million jobs sounds big. It is not big enough.
That is the uncomfortable but necessary warning contained in the argument advanced by Duma Gqubule and Neil Coleman which I support. Their intervention matters because it forces us to confront the arithmetic of our crisis, not just the language of aspiration. South Africa has become too comfortable with slogans that sound ambitious but do not survive contact with reality. We have mastered the rhetoric of urgency while avoiding the policy rupture that urgency requires.
The key point is simple. If South Africa creates five million jobs over ten years, but the labour force expands by roughly seven and a half million over the same period, then the country is still moving backwards against the scale of need. In plain language: we would be creating fewer jobs than the number of people entering or seeking entry into the labour market. That means unemployment remains structurally entrenched. It may shift at the margins, but it is not decisively broken.
This is what too many economic elites still fail to grasp. South Africa’s unemployment crisis is not a public-relations problem. It is not a communications problem. It is not a problem that can be massaged through selective indicators, upbeat investor language, or quarterly narratives that tell us we are “turning the corner”. It is a structural failure of the economy to absorb people into dignified, productive work.
And it is getting normalised.
That is perhaps the greatest danger of all.
A society with millions of jobless people, millions more discouraged from even looking for work, and entire communities surviving on fragile informal hustle, social grants, family remittances and debt, cannot behave as if this is merely one policy issue among many. Unemployment sits beneath crime, violence, social despair, fractured households, declining trust in democracy and the combustible anger of a generation that sees no credible route into economic life.
This is why Duma’s statistics matter. They are not just economic numbers. They are a warning about the political future of the Republic.
The argument can be simplified for ordinary South Africans. If we add around 500,000 jobs a year, that sounds impressive. But if around 750,000 people are entering the labour market annually, then every year we are still falling behind. That is why a target of five million jobs in ten years does not fundamentally alter the crisis. It is not that five million jobs would mean nothing. It is that they would mean too little relative to the scale of exclusion.
Put differently: South Africa does not only need more jobs. It needs a far higher rate of labour absorption. It needs an economy deliberately designed to pull people in, not one that grows in narrow enclaves while leaving the majority outside the gate.
This is where the real debate must begin.
For too long, our policy establishment has relied on a shallow formula: fix electricity, improve logistics, reduce red tape, reassure investors, stabilise inflation, control debt, and growth will eventually create jobs. Some of this is necessary. None of it is sufficient. A better functioning supply side is important, but it does not amount to an employment strategy. It does not answer the central question: what kind of growth, in which sectors, at what labour intensity, under what state direction, and with what social floor for those excluded?
South Africa needs to stop treating unemployment as a side effect of growth policy and start treating employment as the central purpose of economic policy.
That requires a direct challenge to the current priorities of National Treasury and the South African Reserve Bank.
Treasury’s dominant instinct remains fiscal restraint, debt stabilisation, and the pursuit of budget credibility through narrow deficit management. The Reserve Bank’s dominant instinct remains inflation control, credibility signalling, and macroeconomic conservatism. These are not irrelevant concerns. Inflation hurts the poor. Unsustainable debt can crowd out future choices. But in a country with mass unemployment, it is no longer enough for the core economic institutions to say, in effect: “Our job is stability; jobs are someone else’s problem.”
No. Jobs is OUR central problem and it must be their problem too.
National Treasury should be targeting not merely fiscal consolidation, but employment-rich public investment. Its key question should not only be: how do we reduce the deficit? It should also be: how do we deploy the fiscus to crowd in production, local procurement, labour-intensive infrastructure, and mass employment? It must shift from passive bookkeeping to strategic economic engineering.
The Reserve Bank, without abandoning price stability, should support a broader employment-led development framework. It should ask how monetary conditions, credit flows and institutional coordination can help expand productive sectors instead of simply disciplining inflation expectations. South Africa cannot monetary-policy its way into social peace while millions remain economically redundant.
So what should these institutions target instead?
First, they should target employment intensity of growth. Every percentage point of GDP growth must be measured not only in output terms, but in jobs created, sectors expanded, youth absorbed, women employed, and local value chains deepened.
Second, they should target sectoral job multipliers. The question is not just whether investment rises, but whether investment goes into sectors that absorb labour: agro-processing, housing, public transport, early childhood development, care economy services, green maintenance, food systems, waste recycling, township manufacturing, tourism, digital business services, local construction materials, and public-interest technology.
Third, they should target developmental credit allocation. South Africa cannot leave productive transformation solely to the balance sheets of cautious commercial banks. The IDC, DBSA, Land Bank, commercial lenders and blended finance instruments should be aligned toward sectors with high employment potential.
Fourth, they should target counter-cyclical demand support. In a highly unequal economy, cash transfers, social protection and public employment do not simply relieve suffering; they sustain demand in local economies, support micro-enterprises, and prevent collapse in poor communities.
Fifth, they should target regional and township economic restructuring. Employment policy must not be abstract or placeless. It must be spatial, local and territorial. Jobs must be built where people live, not only where capital already concentrates.
Once we understand this, Duma’s statistics stop being depressing and start becoming clarifying. They tell us that under the current structure of growth, even a seemingly large jobs number can fail to break the crisis. That means one thing: we need additional employment scenarios, not one weak national target.
South Africa should be debating at least three scenarios.
Scenario one is the conservative path: five million jobs in ten years. This mostly accommodates new entrants but leaves the unemployment mountain largely intact. It is better than stagnation, but it is nowhere near victory.
Scenario two is a labour-absorbing transformation path: seven to eight million jobs and work opportunities over ten years. This would require stronger growth, but more importantly, growth with a much higher employment multiplier. That means aggressive industrial policy, labour-intensive infrastructure, expanded public employment, township enterprise ecosystems, care economy investment, and stronger localisation.
Scenario three is a national employment mobilisation path: ten million or more work opportunities over ten years, combining formal jobs, public employment, social economy expansion, community works, service cooperatives, green transition jobs, youth service, and digitally enabled local production. This is the scale at which South Africa begins to meaningfully push unemployment down, restore hope, and rebuild the social contract.
That is why I argue for a National Employment and Structural Transformation Pact, built around five shifts.
The first shift is from stability-first economics to employment-centred macroeconomic coordination. Inflation and deficits matter, but jobs, production and inclusion must sit at the centre of macroeconomic decision-making.
The second shift is from growth in the abstract to labour-absorbing growth in practice. We must stop celebrating growth that enriches balance sheets while bypassing households. The economy must be judged by how many people it pulls into work.
The third shift is from a spectator state to a developmental state. The state must shape markets, direct procurement, discipline monopoly power, finance new sectors, and build economic ecosystems that employ people at scale.
The fourth shift is from residual public works to a serious public employment system. Public employment should be permanent in design, dignified in condition, developmental in purpose, and linked to training and transition pathways. Caring for children, the elderly, communities, schools, clinics, public spaces and the environment is not “lesser work”. It is nation-building work.
The fifth shift is from a mineral-export, low-value, semi-colonial growth path to diversified productive transformation. South Africa cannot continue exporting raw advantage and importing finished dependency. Industrial diversification, beneficiation, localisation and domestic demand expansion are not optional. They are central to any real jobs strategy.
This is the real choice before us.
We can continue with polite summits, cautious targets, and the familiar sermon that only the private sector can save us if government behaves itself. Or we can finally accept that mass unemployment requires the policy equivalent of a wartime mobilisation: coordinated macroeconomic action, industrial deepening, public employment expansion, social protection, local production and a state willing to lead.
South Africans do not need another summit that tells them to be patient. We are tired of being unemployed.
They need a state that understands the scale of the emergency, an economy designed around human absorption rather than exclusion, and leaders willing to admit that yesterday’s economic thinking cannot solve today’s social catastrophe.
Five million jobs in ten years is not a plan equal to the crisis.
South Africa needs an employment war plan.
And it needs it now.
* Faiez Jacobs is a former Member of Parliament, founder of The Transcendence Group, Capetonian, Activist, and Servant of the People.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.