ActionSA is deeply concerned by the latest Quarterly Labour Force Survey released by Statistics South Africa, which shows that there was a 97 000 increase in unemployed South Africans in the third quarter of 2026.
The official unemployment rate has risen to 33.7 %, meaning that more than one in every three people in South Africa’s labour force cannot find work.
Even more concerning, the expanded rate of unemployment, which includes discouraged work-seekers, has increased to 44%. More than 12 million South Africans are now either unemployed or so discouraged that they have stopped looking for work all together.
This demonstrates that the GNU has failed dismally in growing the economy and creating jobs. Rather, than blaming external factors, the GNU must look at the numerous own goals that they have and continued to score. If the GNU spent less time fighting each other in parliament and in court and spent more time working on and introducing and implementing workable solutions, the economy and unemployed may have a chance. Until that happens, hope for change remains distant.
Whilst millions of South Africans suffer a loss of dignity, hope, agency and opportunities through unemployment the bloated cabinet of 75 ministers and their deputies remain unaffected. Ministers and their Deputies continue to live the life of luxury while South Africans are being asked to endure an unemployment crisis that has persisted for years and shows no sign of abating.
It is inconceivable that Ministers and Deputies that fail to perform in addressing South Africa’s stagnant economic growth and jobs crisis remain in their positions and unaffected. As such, ActionSA therefore continues its call for President Cyril Ramaphosa to replace the Ministers responsible for the jobs crisis including those from the Departments of: Labour and Unemployment; Trade, Industry and Competition; Public Works and Infrastructure; Transport; and Small Business Development.
President Ramaphosa must act on ActionSA’s call for Ministers and Deputes to be fired. Until there is accountability and consequences for non-performance nothing will change and millions of South Africans will continue to suffer the real and damning consequences of being unemployed.
ActionSA Infrastructure: Proposes private-sector partnerships to fix Eskom and Transnet.
Tokyo Dream
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.
Snow Cream
Fun South African Fact: The first successful heart transplant was in a Cape Town hospital