PRESIDENT Cyril Ramaphosa says the state of the nation’s economy and the high number of people out of work keep him awake at night.
“The state of unemployment, it is a very difficult thing to have to countenance,” Ramaphosa told reporters on Wednesday in Cape Town.
The millions of people in South Africa “who are not economically engaged in any activity: that is enough to keep me awake at night. It concerns me a great deal,” he said.
South Africa’s economy is struggling to recover from its worst contraction in almost three decades in 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Growth last year was stifled by the worst riots since the end of apartheid in 1994 that left 354 people dead.
The nation’s 34.9% unemployment rate is the highest on a global list of 82 countries and the Eurozone monitored by Bloomberg.
“As I began the State of the Nation Address last week, I said that the speech would focus on the measures we are taking to enable faster economic growth and the creation of employment,” said Ramaphosa during his oral reply to the State of the Nation Address on Wednesday.
“This is because fixing the economy is our most pressing challenge at this moment, and is essential to progress in almost every other area of life. Our focus on the economy does not, however, diminish the importance of the many other areas of government’s work.”
Ramaphosa said that despite the great progress that has been made in the last 28 years to address the legacy of dispossession and exploitation, the material divides between black and white, men and women, rural and urban, still persist.
“The steady economic recovery, expanding employment and increasing investment that followed the advent of our democracy was disrupted by the 2008 global financial crisis, by falling commodity prices, by severe energy constraints, by inefficient network industries and by the impact of state capture on so many vital public institutions,”said Ramaphosa.
“At the same time, our economy has become less and less competitive.
We could not sustain investment in economic infrastructure.”
“As public spending rapidly increased, the benefits of increased spending declined, to a point where the cost of servicing our debt has been crowding out social spending. This was the situation that this administration was elected in 2019 to correct, and we took several decisive measures to turn the economy and the country around.”
- * Staff Reporter. Additional reporting by Bloomberg.
