Your front page article on the Capitec CEO’s views on unemployment was an embarrassment to Capitec, Gerrie Fourie and Business Day (“Capitec CEO argues SA’s jobless rate as low as 10%", June 10).
Anyone who can read is easily able to find and download a Stats SA Quarterly Labour Force Survey (QLFS) report, which clearly shows self-employment is counted as part of employment. That seemingly neither Fourie nor your reporter checked this, means the entire premise of the article is incorrect.
There are legitimate concerns about the QLFS, which I and others have written about, including the poor quality data on earnings and employment numbers being higher in the General Household Survey than the QLFS, but that Stats SA does not count the self-employed as employed is not one of the concerns. It may be that unemployment is a bit lower than the QLFS says, but there is no way the unemployment rate is 10%.
The Capitec CEO should stay in his lane and confine his pronouncements to topics such as borrowing and lending.
Prof Andrew Kerr
UCT School of Economics
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