Grim quarter unemployment stats strengthen case for a B.I.G while exposing big Western Cape job lie

15 May 2024

The First Quarter 2024 job statistics released by StatsSA today showed a 0.8% increase in the overall unemployment rate compared to the fourth quarter of last year. 

The statistics make particularly grim reading from the perspective of young people, with youth unemployment rising by 1.3% to 45.5%.

The statistics also paint a very different picture of unemployment in the Western Cape to that depicted on DA election posters. 

The posters tell you that people in the Western Cape are working. And Western Cape Premier Alan Winde lies that the province has generated 79% of the country’s jobs over the past five years. 

But according to the quarterly labour survey the Western Cape has suffered the most job losses in the country between January and March (down 17 000 jobs). Second worst is North-West (down 13 000), with KwaZulu-Natal performing best with 35 000 new jobs.

These numbers scream for the need for a Basic Income Grant of sufficient value to enable all South Africans to feed themselves. That value should be a minimum of R999 a month, which GOOD economic research shows the country can afford by cutting wasteful and unnecessary expenditure – including on the provincial tier of government.

Until the economy shows sufficiently rigorous and sustainable growth to begin to catch up with the need for jobs, the State is obliged by the Constitution to provide for citizens’ basic needs.

The extent and the level of poverty is South Africa’s single greatest crisis and injustice…  a crisis that the R370 a month SRD grant falls woefully short of addressing, and an injustice reflecting the extent of the unfinished business of transforming the shape of the apartheid construct the democracy inherited 30 years ago.

Issued by Brett Herron, GOOD Secretary-General & Member of Parliament, 15 May 2024