The Eastern Cape remains the province with the highest unemployment rate in the country.
That is according to the Democratic Alliance in the Eastern Cape, commenting on Tuesday’s Quarterly Labour Force Survey released by Statistics South Africa, which showed that the official unemployment rate remained unchanged quarter-to-quarter at 27.7 percent.
“As a result 6.2 million South Africans are now without work — a 75,000 increase from the second quarter of 2017,” Stats SA said.
Commenting, DA MPL, Bobby Stevenson, said that “unemployment in the province increased by 1.1 percentage points, from 34.4% in the second quarter (April to June 2017) to 35.5% in the third quarter (July to September 2017).
“This means that there is now a total of 781 000 people unemployed in our province according to the official unemployment rate. When one adds the number of discouraged work seekers of 360 000, it takes the total to 1 141 000 people,” Stevenson said.
“The catastrophic management of our economy is exposed by the sheer horror of these statistics,” he charged.
Stevenson said the Eastern Cape was paying the price not only for the national economic meltdown but also because of political divisions in the province.
“ANC congresses, where chairs are thrown around instead of ideas, does not promote the climate for investment that we need for job creation,” he said.
“Year-on-year, unemployment has gone up an alarming 7.3 percentage points, resulting in an additional 216 000 people losing their jobs, of which 38 000 were in the last quarter. Our expanded rate of unemployment – those people who have given up looking for a job -- has increased from 41.3 % in July-September 2016 to 45.3 % for the same period this year, the highest in the country,” Stevenson said.
“Unless we get the politics right, we will not get our economy right. This is clear from the ongoing infighting in the ANC and the recent medium-term budget policy statement delivered by the Minister of Finance, Malusi Gigaba in Parliament last Wednesday,” he added.
