𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐉𝐨𝐛𝐬 𝐂𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐬 𝐈𝐬 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐥. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐓𝐚𝐫𝐠𝐞𝐭 𝐈𝐬 𝐖𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐠
𝐁𝐲 𝐀𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐡 𝐑𝐨𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐠
Every July, during Mandela Month, South Africans are asked to give 67 minutes to something bigger than ourselves. This year, perhaps we should begin by giving a few minutes to something Mandela said about unemployment when the stakes were still raw and the country still new.
On 7 May 1996, speaking at the first graduation ceremony of the ORT-STEP Institute, Nelson Mandela named the crisis directly: the country, he said, was faced with a huge unemployment problem, and education was a key ingredient in solving it, because it gives people the skills the economy needs. He was not describing a fixed number of jobs, with one group taking from another. He was describing capacity, a country emerging from apartheid with schools that had denied millions the tools to participate meaningfully in the economy. His answer wasn’t to shrink the pool of people chasing work. It was to grow the pool of people equipped to create it.
Thirty years on, that distinction has been lost in the noise of this winter’s protests against foreign nationals. The anger is not difficult to understand. Joblessness in South Africa is not a statistic on a page. It is rent unpaid, food stretched, young people sitting at home after matric, parents unable to provide, and communities losing faith that tomorrow will be better. That anger is real and deserves to be taken seriously, which is exactly why it matters where we point it.
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐦
South Africa’s unemployment crisis is not caused by foreign nationals. It is caused by an economy that has failed to grow fast enough, a schooling and skills system that still leaves too many young people behind, a state that too often frustrates rather than enables enterprise, and a labour market that has not created workplaces at anything close to the scale required.
The numbers are brutal. The Centre for Development and Enterprise’s 2025 report describes South Africa as having the deepest and most persistent unemployment crisis in the world. More than 12 million South Africans want work but cannot find it, and for 17 years, roughly 1,000 people have joined the unemployment queue every day. CDE’s diagnosis is not that migrants are taking jobs. It is that policy and governance failures have slowed growth to almost nothing, and without growth, no unemployment solution can work.
Stats SA’s latest labour figures confirm the scale of the disaster. In Q1 2026, the official unemployment rate stood at 32,7%. Among young people aged 15 to 24, it was 60,9%. Among those aged 25 to 34, it was 40,6%. That is the heart of the crisis: not a country with too many outsiders, but a country with too few pathways into work.
𝐖𝐡𝐲 𝐰𝐞 𝐬𝐜𝐚𝐩𝐞𝐠𝐨𝐚𝐭 𝐚𝐧𝐲𝐰𝐚𝐲
If the facts don’t support it, why does the narrative persist? Afrobarometer study by Christopher Claassen, modelling the drivers of South African xenophobia, found that poverty, relative deprivation and frustration with government were the strongest predictors of anti-foreigner sentiment, a mechanism of scapegoating, in which hopelessness looks for a visible target.
The immigration numbers do not support the scapegoating narrative either. Stats SA’s 2022 Census recorded just over 2,4 million international migrants, just below 4% of the population. That is not enough to explain a national jobs crisis of this depth.
This is not a story about who is taking jobs. It is a story about jobs never being created in the first place, at anything like the scale the population needs.
None of this means South Africa should have no immigration policy. Of course, the country needs lawful, competent, fair immigration management. Home Affairs must work. Borders must be managed. Labour laws must apply to everyone. Employers who exploit undocumented workers, or use them to undercut South African workers, should face consequences.
But vigilantism is not policy. Most people caught up in this moment are not its architects, they are frightened and out of options, looking for someone to blame in a system that has given them very little. Still, chasing people from spaza shops, threatening tenants, looting businesses or blaming African migrants for state failure will not create a single sustainable job. It will only destroy livelihoods, deepen fear, scare investors and distract us from what needs to be done.
𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐦𝐢𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐰𝐬
The research on migrant entrepreneurship often runs opposite to what the slogans suggest. A World Bank study found that between 1996 and 2011, immigrant workers in South Africa had a positive impact on local jobs and earnings, estimating that each immigrant worker generated approximately two jobs for local South Africans.
These positive outcomes are largely attributed to higher rates of entrepreneurial activity and self-employment among migrants compared to local residents. By engaging in the informal economy and establishing small businesses, these individuals provide vital services and generate a multiplier effect that benefits the wider community.
That does not mean every foreign-owned business is good, lawful or fair, no economy works like that. It means the broad claim that foreign nationals are the reason South Africans are unemployed is not supported by the evidence.
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐢𝐧𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐥 𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐨𝐦𝐲 𝐚𝐬 𝐡𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧
The informal economy also deserves a more honest conversation. In Q4 2025, Stats SA reported that the informal sector accounted for 21,4% of all jobs, the second-largest source of employment after the formal sector. These spaces are where millions of South Africans survive, trade, learn, hustle and build.
Instead of harassing informal traders, South Africa should be asking how to help more of them grow: how to make permits simpler, how municipalities can support trading spaces rather than destroy them, how to help spaza shops, hair salons, repair businesses, food traders and township manufacturers access finance, training, digital tools, bulk buying power and safer infrastructure.
𝐁𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐭𝐨 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐰𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐞𝐝
Which brings us back to Mandela, standing at that first ORT-STEP graduation of technology and science teachers, calling the organisation’s work an imaginative and far-reaching contribution to opening doors that had been closed to most South Africans, built on a partnership of educators, business and government.
At ORT SA, that partnership is the work we see every day: building skills, supporting teachers, opening pathways for young people, and helping communities access the tools that make participation possible. It is not dramatic work. It rarely fits into a slogan. But it is the work Mandela pointed to, patient, practical, partnership-driven, capacity building.
So, this Mandela Month, the 67 minutes’ worth giving might not be a single act of service but something smaller and more sustained: mentoring a young person looking for their first opportunity, supporting a skills or enterprise programme in your community, hiring locally where you can, or simply correcting the record in a taxi rank, around a Shabbos table, in a staffroom or a boardroom. Yes, the unemployment crisis is real. Yes, the anger is understandable. Yes, the state must do its job. But the fix was never going to come from fewer foreigners, it comes from more people equipped, and more doors held open.
