33.6% Unemployment: How Did South Africa Get Here?

South Africa's unemployment rate has jumped to, listen to this, 33.6% in the second quarter from 32.7% in the first quarter of the year.

The number of unemployed people increased by 345,000. to 8.5 million, while the total of those with jobs fell by 16,000 to 16.7 million.

Here's something even more depressing.

The number of jobless young people aged 15 to 34 increased by 264,000 to 5 million.

That's right, 5 million young people between 15 and 34 are jobless.

are jobless right now, almost matching the total of unemployed youth, which fell by 40,000 to 5.6 million.

As a result, the youth unemployment rate in South Africa increased by 1.5 percentage points to 47.5% in the second quarter.

Basically, when you see a young person walking in the street, there's another one.

who's unemployed.

When you see two walking in the street, one of them is unemployed.

That's the statistic.

Multimakanya, I mean, we are failing.

Why are we failing? Where are we failing? Why are we here?

Yeah, we are failing dismally.

I think obviously the first point of failure, it's the growth rate.

I mean, we have an anemic growth rate of about 1%.

And you can never hope to create jobs with a growth rate of that much.

So every year, we pour out however many matriculants.

I think it's about 500,000 people or something like that.

Anyway, there is a generation of matriculants that we pour out of the schooling system.

And they go and they hit the streets with very little a prospect of jobs.

Secondly, those matriculants, some of them will get into tertiary education.

Some of them will go to university, some will go to the TVETS and so on and so on.

But even those, their chances of getting a job once they've gone through that four year, three to four year degree or whatever qualification they have, their chances of being employed are still next to nil.

So And then the following year would do the same thing.