GOOD Statement by Suzette Little, GOOD Deputy Secretary-General & City of Cape Town Councillor:
According to Stats SA’s Quarterly Labour Force Survey (Q2, 2025), the Western Cape recorded an unemployment rate of 21.1%, compared to the national average of 33.2%. On paper, this appears commendable, the province has consistently reported lower unemployment than the rest of South Africa over the past decade.
But the lived reality tells a very different story.
In a 1 September 2025 Urban Waste Management Portfolio Committee meeting, the City of Cape Town’s Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) report revealed a staggering figure: 900,000 people are registered on the City’s jobseekers database, all hoping to secure one of just 30,000 temporary EPWP jobs.
To put this in perspective: Stats SA estimates the Western Cape’s working-age population to be around 5.1 million. At a 21.1% unemployment rate, that translates to approximately 1 million unemployed people province-wide. Yet Cape Town alone records 900,000 jobseekers on its system, leaving almost no space for the rest of the province, a statistical absurdity that simply doesn’t hold up.
The City and DA defenders may argue that the database includes duplicates or is hard to update. But even if some level of duplication exists, it cannot account for hundreds of thousands of excess entries. The City itself admits it struggles to contact jobseekers when work becomes available – an admission that underscores the scale of the crisis. And crucially, not all unemployed individuals are even registered: informal workers, discouraged jobseekers, and people in under-serviced areas are often excluded entirely.
The 900,000 figure is not an overestimate… it’s an undercount.
Rather than confront this reality, the DA leans on provincial averages to paper over the crisis, spinning the narrative that Cape Town is “the best place to find a job.” That narrative collapses when nearly a million residents are officially competing for just 30,000 jobs.
The DA’s story is a dangerous one, a polished fiction that insults the real struggles of the unemployed. Behind the stats are families barely surviving, young people with no hope of work, and communities abandoned by those in power.
Let’s call this what it is: not a success story, but a staggering failure of leadership.
GOOD Manifesto on Economic Growth: Policies aimed at stimulating economic growth and job creation.
rzr
The Man who could only Drink Milk
I know an old man who had lived a life full of adventure, but his health started to catch up with him. He\’d run the Boston Marathon, was an avid surfer, and climbed Everest, but he\’d started to have abdominal pains around his 85th birthday and went to see a doctor. Sadly, he ultimately was diagnosed with a rare degenerative liver disease that slowly made him allergic to everything he ate.
He kept copious notes, and as an avid gastronomist slowly grew to despair as everything he\’d spent his life enjoying became something he could no longer eat. Alcohol went first, then mushrooms, then bread, then root vegetables, then coffee, one at a time he had to remove them from his diet. The doctor was clear: if he kept eating something his liver rejected the autoimmune response would be quick and severe, and would lead to a painful death. Little by little, everything was taken away as an option, until the only thing that remained was milk.
In some ways, this actually made life easier, because the mental strain of remembering what he could and couldn\’t eat was gone, but then so was the joy in variety. But he took it in stride, and got his own cow and took classes from a farmer to learn everything he could about the only thing that could give him sustenance. And even within milk, he could still have yogurt, butter, cream, some cheeses, and other milk-derived products he hadn\’t fully rejected yet, so it wasn\’t all bad. But then one day a few months later he felt the pain again, and he knew cow\’s milk was no longer an option.
Lacking other options, he tried goat\’s milk, and he was delighted that it worked! The protein structure is just different enough that his body still tolerated it. That bought him another month. And that\’s when we came up with a wonderful plan to go on one last grand adventure around the world. If he could get one month of life out of the milk of every mammal, he\’d actually have a few more years to enjoy life to the fullest and see the world in all its beauty. Each month, we\’d pick a place with a new mammal, and he would immerse himself fully with the locals, learn all the ways to prepare the milk, and just enjoy the hand he had been dealt as much as he could.
We milked sheep in New Zealand. Camels in Egypt. Zebras in South Africa. Giant bats in Indonesia. Do you know how many Peruvian cuy you need to milk to get a single glass? I do. Even as his health slowly faded, he stayed cheerful, and I felt lucky to join him on the adventure of a lifetime. That brings us to today when he got to the very end of his spreadsheet, and declared that he was now allergic to every mammal. He\’d enjoyed his journey, but his time had come to an end, for there was nothing left to milk.
To which I said nonsense, I bet we can milk a few thousand karma out of this post.
Mint Ness
Slap chips – French fries [slup-chips] An Afrikaans word meaning limp and describing soft, fat French fries. These are usually mixed with tomato sauce and vinegar.