In 1981 Norman Tebbit spoke at a Conservative Party conference in the UK and said: “I grew up in the 1930s with an unemployed father. He didn’t riot. He got on his bike and looked for work, and he kept looking until he found it.”
For the next four decades, until he died in 2025, the Margaret Thatcher loyalist was mocked with the “on yer bike” catchphrase. The New Statesman said he had transformed a matter of structural forces, for which the government was partly responsible, into one of individual work ethic in which “the unemployed have no-one to blame but themselves, the lazy bastards”.
Last week ANC chair Gwede Mantashe insulted the country’s 12.5-million unemployed people and blamed them for their unemployment, ahead of a watershed local government election where the party is expected to suffer further devastating losses.
He shifted the blame for the world’s second highest unemployment rate away from his party’s macroeconomic policy incompetence towards the unemployed.
“I am over 70 years old and I have never had a government looking for a job for me. People expect the government to go and give them jobs. They do not look for jobs and that must change. We must move out of being a passive society to becoming an active society,” Mantashe said.
South Africa needs a new vision to achieve full employment by 2037. This requires people like Mantashe to understand the drivers of unemployment and the math of the jobs crisis
ANC president Cyril Ramaphosa delivered the party’s January 8 statement in North West, which has a 52.4% unemployment rate, and said nothing about jobs in 36 pages. This showed the party has run out of ideas and has no clue on how to confront the jobs crisis after “eight wasted years” with Ramaphosa as head of state. The government’s structural reforms are not transformative projects that will shift the needle. About 90% by value are in the energy sector and the rest are not significant.
South Africa needs a new vision to achieve full employment by 2037. This requires people like Mantashe to understand the drivers of unemployment and the math of the jobs crisis. Has he forgotten that only three months ago more than 1-million people, including 334,765 graduates, applied for 5,500 trainee positions in the police service?
On the supply side, from the fourth quarter of 2008 to the third quarter of 2025 there were 8.9-million new entrants in the labour force. There was an annual average labour force growth rate of 2.2%. During 2024 there were 1-million new entrants in the labour force.
On the demand side, there is a relationship between GDP growth and jobs. When GDP grows by 1%, employment grows by 0.9%. From 2009 to 2024 there was an annual average GDP growth rate of 1.1%. By comparison, 155 emerging and developing countries cruised to an annual average GDP growth rate of 4.4% without much effort, according to the International Monetary Fund.
From the fourth quarter of 2008 to the third quarter of 2025 the economy created 2.3-million jobs. It shed 561,000 jobs for young people (15-34) and created 2.8-million jobs for older people (35–64). The number of unemployed people increased by 6.6-million. The unemployment rate soared to 42.4% from 28.7%.
This means the economy created jobs for only 15.4% of the 5.9-million people who were previously unemployed during the fourth quarter of 2008 and the 8.9-million new entrants into the labour force. There were no jobs for 12.5-million people, including 1-million unemployed graduates.
Getting on their bikes to search for jobs would have made no difference. The unemployment crisis is a problem of inadequate demand or spending power, not skills or individual work ethic. If the problem was on the supply side there would have been millions of unfilled vacancies. The skills mismatch theory of unemployment is a fallacy.
If the ANC had not mismanaged the economy and GDP had grown by 4.4% a year since 2009, employment would have increased by 4% a year. The economy would have created 13.2-million jobs and employment would have soared to about 28-million, compared with 17.1-million during the third quarter of 2025. There would be 1.6-million unemployed people and the unemployment rate would be 5.4%.
Why has there been such chronically low GDP growth for so long? Why has it been impossible for the ANC to achieve the annual average GDP growth rate of emerging and developing economies?
We cannot have a passive state that only creates an environment for investment, whatever that means. We can deregulate the whole economy, but that will make no difference if there is no demand (or spending power) for the goods and services companies can produce
The problem is that the National Treasury only cares about a primary budget surplus target of 2.5% of GDP. The Reserve Bank only cares about a 3% inflation rate. Nobody is responsible for growing the economy and creating jobs. Assuming an annual average labour force growth rate of 2.5% until 2037, the economy will have to achieve an annual average GDP growth rate of 4.4% to create jobs for the 10.2-million new entrants in the labour force, let alone the 12.5-million unemployed people.
South Africans must understand the scale of the jobs crisis and that unemployment is a macroeconomic policy issue. We cannot have a passive state that only creates an environment for investment, whatever that means. We can deregulate the whole economy, but that will make no difference if there is no demand (or spending power) for the goods and services companies can produce.
Fast-growing developing countries have a 20-year vision for the economy with five-year plans and annual targets. Each year, the government calibrates the macroeconomic policy tools to achieve the GDP growth target.
There are three policy tools that can take South Africa onto a path towards full employment. There must be an annual GDP growth target of 6% that is binding on Treasury and the Reserve Bank. However, this will not be enough to achieve full employment. There will still be 7.7-million unemployed people by 2037. There must be aggressive industrial policies that increase the employment intensity of GDP growth from 0.9%.
Finally, there must be a huge increase in public employment programmes, which will provide 1.8-million work opportunities this year. We can start by using the surpluses of R140bn at the Unemployment Insurance Fund and R60bn at the sector education and training authorities.
The ANC’s electoral collapse correlates with the dramatic decline in the trend GDP growth rate from 3.6% a year during the first 15 years of democracy to 1.1% a year during the last 16 years. The party’s share of the vote plunged to 40.2% in 2024 from 65.9% in 2009. There can be no renewal within the context of continued low GDP growth and soaring unemployment.
The ANC has no plan or desire to confront the jobs crisis. It does not want to be in power and seemingly wants to lose the 2026 local government elections. South Africans must give it what it wants and punish the party at the polls.
• Gqubule is an adviser on economic development and transformation.
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