The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) notes the catastrophic unemployment statistics released by Statistics South Africa (StatsSA) today, which once again confirm that South Africa is descending deeper into poverty, hunger, hopelessness, and economic collapse. The official unemployment rate has now risen sharply to 32.7%, up from 31.4% in the previous quarter, after the economy lost more than 345 000 jobs in just the first quarter of 2026. This means that more than 8.1 million South Africans are officially unemployed.
More alarming is the fact that discouraged work-seekers increased by a further 178 000 people, bringing the number of South Africans who have completely given up looking for work to 3.9 million. The broader potential labour force has also now increased to 4.9 million people who are available for work but excluded from meaningful economic participation.
South Africa’s unemployment rate has now remained above 30% for more than five consecutive years, making it one of the highest unemployment rates in the world. Youth unemployment among those aged 15 to 34 remains at approximately 45.8%, with even worse conditions among Black African youth in townships and rural communities.
The labour force statistics also reveal the gendered nature of unemployment in South Africa. Women continue to bear the heaviest burden of economic exclusion, poverty, and labour market insecurity. Black women, particularly in rural areas and townships, remain disproportionately concentrated amongst the unemployed, the underpaid, and those trapped in precarious informal work.
The latest data confirms that women continue to experience higher unemployment rates than men, while many employed women remain concentrated in low-paying sectors such as domestic work, retail, social services, and precarious informal employment. Even where employment exists, women workers are overwhelmingly represented in sectors characterised by exploitation, low wages, insecurity, and limited economic mobility.
It is important to highlight that the crisis facing South Africans cannot be understood through unemployment statistics alone. These figures exist alongside a collapsing standard of living for working-class people. South Africans are being attacked simultaneously by rising unemployment, increasing electricity tariffs, escalating fuel prices, soaring transport costs, and unaffordable food prices. Millions who still have jobs are surviving on wages that cannot sustain basic human dignity.
The current national minimum wage remains fundamentally disconnected from economic reality. Workers earning minimum wage are expected to survive on incomes that do not adequately cover food, electricity, transport, rent, school costs, and healthcare. Meanwhile, the cost of a basic household food basket continues to increase month after month, making survival itself a daily struggle for millions of families.
It is a damning indictment on the ANC government that nearly 70% of South Africans do not have reliable access to enough food as hunger has become normalised in democratic South Africa. Parents are skipping meals so their children can eat, workers are borrowing money simply to travel to work, and graduates are trapped in debt and unemployment with no prospects for the future. The ANC has completely abandoned the people of South Africa. Instead of confronting unemployment, hunger, inequality, and economic collapse with seriousness and urgency, the ANC leadership is consumed by protecting Cyril Ramaphosa. Every institution of government has now been transformed into a shield designed to preserve Ramaphosa’s presidency and his millions in unaccounted for cash, while society collapses around them.
Additionally, the ANC has imposed neoliberal austerity, privatisation, and fiscal conservatism while unemployment and hunger worsen year after year. The result is visible everywhere in collapsing municipalities, deindustrialised towns, rising crime, worsening inequality, and growing despair amongst the youth.
The EFF reiterates that the only sustainable solution to the unemployment crisis is the radical restructuring of the economy through land expropriation without compensation, state-led industrialisation, nationalisation of strategic sectors, beneficiation of mineral resources, expansion of public infrastructure programmes, and mass job creation driven by a capable developmental state.
South Africans must now decide whether they will continue rewarding the ANC for decades of failure, or whether they will choose a revolutionary alternative prepared to place the poor and working class at the centre of governance.
The EFF’s rhetoric has sparked debates about race relations in South Africa.
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