South Africa Statistics Chief Defends Jobless-Data Calculations

The head of South Africa's statistics agency defended the methodology of his organization's unemployment data after the chief of the nation's top bank by customers said misclassification of traders means the jobless rate was much lower.
Capitec Bank Holdings Ltd. Chief Executive Officer Gerrie Fourie recently said that the unemployment rate — which was 32.9% for the first quarter and is among the highest globally tracked by Bloomberg — would be closer to 10% if self-employed people and those working in informal markets are counted, according to Business Day newspaper.

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News24

an hour ago

• News24

New unity government, same old habits

The government of national unity is struggling to address South Africa's deep socioeconomic crises as it buckles under a toxic mix of ideological divisions, chronic indecision, and the ANC's reluctance to make tough policy choices. Further decline is inevitable unless immediate reforms are prioritised over more endless consultation, writes Khaya Sithole. Over the past 12 months, South Africa's political landscape has been buttressed between two difficult conversations regarding the nation's future. The first was ignited by the lack of a decisive victory for any single party in the general election. The consequence of the lack of a majority, forced various parties to cobble together a government of national unity (GNU) whose working mechanics remain – even to this day – dubious at best. President Cyril Ramaphosa – as the leader of the coalition – has presided over a house divided by perpetual ideological orientations and chronically overwhelmed by the scale of the problem they have been elected to solve. The scale and spectrum of the nation's problems are plenty. From poor governance across different facets of government, to a wholly inept crime and security cluster, to the persistence of unemployment and infrastructure decay, the national canvas of things that must be addressed is wide and unwieldy. Since the beginning of the year, internal divergences between the GNU have that led to litigation, delayed budgets and threats of walkouts, have only been matched by the truly bizarre fixation that a certain Donald Trump has had with the country's social and economic policy orientation. The state of the GNU today is that it is an alliance learning to work whilst the country at large is not working. In recent weeks, the publication of labour force statistics have reiterated perhaps more cogently than any other metric – the scale of the problem. From a working age population of 41.7 million and a labour force of 25 million, the ability to find employment for just over 16.8 million citizens illustrates the structural fractures of the country's economy. The consequential effects of these low employment numbers, is the reduced scope for tax revenues and the inevitable squeeze on spending priorities. The longstanding solution that the ANC has preferred over the past 15 years – borrowing to obscurity – has created concomitant effects on the intensity of spending squeezes. Debt service costs have outpaced key priority areas and, left unchecked, will keep displacing other priorities that are already squeezed for resource allocation. The boring answer to these problems – getting the right economic blueprint for the sociopolitical and socioeconomic canvas that we have – eluded the ANC until South Africans lost faith in its ability to unilaterally solve the problem. Over the past year, the question has moved to whether an alliance, armed with additional political persuasions and orientations, can turn the ship around. The importance of this deliberation is the simple – yet sometimes bizarrely unpopular fact – that decision-making about national resources, policies and strategies – comes with often painful tradeoffs. The tradeoffs required to address South Africa's unique problems, have often proved difficult for the ANC to countenance and rather than biting the bullet at critical decision-making points, the party preferred to defer to the future. Examples of this perpetual planning and consultation loop include the unresolved questions around the SRD grant versus the basic income grant; private sector liberalisation versus creating new state banks and state pharmaceutical institutions; and the long-term plight of state enterprises. In between the episodes on lethargy, public institutions declined, public resources were mismanaged and inefficiently managed; and the public purse was squeezed. The budget showdown in 2025, which led to three versions of the budget being drafted, was highly influenced by the need to start dealing with difficult and long-deferred questions about the right model that balances revenue generation and resource allocation in light of the state of the economy in its current form. The difficult reality is that in its current form – the economy is ill-suited to address these intersectional facets. The focus on the budget season was on the extraction of more resources from the current model. The problem evident in that, is that the primary canvas is one that is no longer suitable for the problems we seek to address. Whilst the finance minister was forced to abandon his preferred method of addressing longstanding issues with a once-off injection of pain through a VAT increase – or so he wanted us to believe – the difficulties that created the issue remain unresolved. The wide cleavage between the resources we can marshal and the priorities we wish to fund, is only getting wider. Options at narrowing it – from repurposing the state bureaucracy through incentivised attritions or simply spending less than necessary on frontline services – come with consequences that very few have mapped out yet and since they are issues that require difficult choices; they are issues that fall within the scope of the decisions that the ANC is historically reluctant to confront. And for as long as the ANC is at the heart of the GNU and remains fixated on its old habits of perpetual consultation and peripheral implementation, it is unclear how its fellow bedfellows can get it to accelerate the pace of addressing difficult issues. The one-year anniversary of the GNU has coincided with the decision of the president to initiate a National Dialogue whose purpose is said to be 'an opportunity to forge a new social compact for the development of our country, a compact that will unite all South Africans, with clear responsibilities for different stakeholders, government, business, labour, civil society, men and women, communities and citizens.' In addition, the National Dialogue 'is anticipated that the National Dialogue will drive progress towards our Vision 2030 and lay the foundation for the next phase of South Africa's National Development Plan.' Having been instrumental in the development of the current national blueprint – the National Development Plan – the President would be well versed in the mechanics and complications of trying to find any blueprint that speaks to the various persuasions of all stakeholders and maps out the right priorities for the nation. The problem of the National Development Plan, is that the government – led by the ANC – conspired to reduce it to a document whose habit of missing key milestones has become the one aspect of it where there is universal consensus. Given what we know about the limitations we have in managing multi-sectoral and intersectional national projects and priorities, it might be prudent to find the narrow range of issues and priorities that have the greatest multiplier effect on everything else we need to fix. The obvious dilemma is that whatever we end up signing for, will require resources, and we now know that in the absence of an economic fix, none of these resources will materialise. Within the spectrum of priorities, it is time to acknowledge that an economic and skills blueprint are priority issues that will aid in addressing the immediate issues – finding resources to fund everything else – and investing in the future social and economic blueprint of the nation. The old habits of trying to please everyone and turning out a document that is merely an equal opportunity policy of appeasement must for once yield to the difficult questions of what must be done immediately in order to arrest the national decline. Any model that traps us all into another consultation loop and deferral of difficult decisions will not only be a monumental waste of resources but for President Ramaphosa – the possibility of championing a National Development Plan, a government of national unity, and a National Dialogue that still all leave the country in socioeconomic and strategy limbo, will be blight on his legacy that will be hard to ignore.

Yahoo

an hour ago

• Yahoo

Mistral AI CEO says AI's biggest threat is people getting lazy

Mistral AI CEO Arthur Mensch says warnings about AI's impact on white-collar workers are overblown. He says the biggest risk AI poses to humans is "deskilling." Mensch said humans needed to remain actively involved in reviewing AI output to keep learning. As tech leaders continue to debate the potential impact of artificial intelligence on the job market, one CEO says the technology's biggest risk may be "deskilling." In an interview with The Times of London, Arthur Mensch, the CEO of the Paris-based firm Mistral AI, dismissed the idea that AI would lead to huge cuts to white-collar jobs, saying the bigger risk was that people may become progressively lazier as they increasingly rely on the tech to search for information. Speaking to the outlet at the VivaTech conference in Paris earlier this month, Mensch, who cofounded the open-source large language model developer alongside Guillaume Lample and Timothée Lacroix in April 2023, said that a key way to avoid this would be to ensure humans remained actively involved in reviewing and critiquing AI output. "It's a risk that you can avoid, if you think of it from a design perspective, if you make sure that you have the right human input, that you keep the human active," he said, adding that he believed it was important humans did not take AI output as the "truth." "You want people to continue learning," he continued. "Being able to synthesize information and criticize information is a core component to learning." Mensch, a former Google DeepMind researcher, also responded to recent warnings that AI poses a threat to white-collar jobs, including from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who recently said that AI could replace half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. "I think it's very much of an overstatement," Mensch said, adding that he believed Amodei liked to "spread fear" about AI as a marketing tactic. Instead, Mensch said he thought AI would change white-collar jobs. "I do expect that we'll have more relational tasks because that's not something you can easily replace," he said. Read the original article on Business Insider

News24

2 hours ago

• News24

China's new trade offer looks generous. But SA must learn from the past

Chinese authorities may lower import tariffs for various goods from African countries. But SA needs to draw appropriate lessons from experience, says Wandile Sihlobo. South Africa's agricultural export focus means the country must always keep an open eye for any potential new market expansion. One country that has consistently been on our radar is China. The country's dominance in global agricultural imports, stable economy, large population, and current low penetration by South Africa's agriculture make it an ideal area for expansion. However, the nonexistence of a preferential trade agreement in agricultural products has disadvantaged South Africa relative to its competitors, such as Australia, Peru, and Chile, among others, which access the Chinese market at a tariff-free rate or with low tariffs. It is against this backdrop that we found the official announcement by the Chinese authorities that they would consider lowering import tariffs for various goods from African countries encouraging. While no official details have been released yet, we view the message as consistent with what the official representatives of the People's Republic of China have been communicating, particularly regarding agriculture. For example, in April, Wu Peng, current Chinese Ambassador to South Africa, stated that '…China and South Africa need to strengthen our bilateral trade and economic cooperation. Chinese government welcomes more South African agricultural and industrial products to enter the huge Chinese market.' China's signalling the willingness to absorb more South African agricultural products is only the first step in what will likely be a long journey, as trade matters generally take time. Ideally, the following steps should be a clear and pragmatic plan for reducing import tariffs and removing phytosanitary barriers that certain agricultural products continue to encounter in the Chinese market. Indeed, the work must be led by South Africa's Department of Trade, Industry, and Competition, as well as the Department of Agriculture, and at specific points, also the Department of International Relations and Cooperation. This will help ensure that China proceeds beyond statements to actual business collaboration. South Africa remains a small share in the Chinese list of agricultural suppliers, at about 0.4%. However, this current access in China is vital for the wool and red meat industry. China accounts for roughly 70% of South Africa's wool exports. There is a progressive increase in red meat exports, even though animal diseases currently cause glitches. The focus should be on expanding this access by lowering duties and other non-tariff barriers to encourage more fruit, grain, and other product exports to China. Still, it is essential to emphasise that the focus on China is not at the expense of existing agricultural export markets and relationships. Instead, China offers an opportunity to continue with export diversification. As we stated recently, the Trade Map data show that China is among the world's leading agricultural importers, accounting for 9% of global agricultural imports in 2024 (before 2024, China had been a leading importer for many years). The US was the world's leading agricultural importer in the same year, accounting for 10% of global imports. Germany accounted for 7%, followed by the UK (4%), the Netherlands (4%), France (4%), Italy (3%), Japan (3%), Belgium (3%) and Canada (2%). It is this diversity of agricultural demand in global markets that convinces us that South Africa's agricultural trade interests cannot be limited to one country but should be spread across all major agricultural importers. Importantly, the approach of promoting diversity and maintaining access to various regions has been a key component of South Africa's agricultural trade policy since the dawn of democracy. For example, in 2024, South Africa exported a record $13.7 billion of agricultural products, up 3% from the previous year. These exports were spread across the diverse regions. The African continent accounted for the lion's share of South Africa's agricultural exports, with a 44% share of the total value. As a collective, Asia and the Middle East were the second-largest agricultural markets, accounting for 21% of the share of overall farm exports. The EU was South Africa's third-largest agricultural market, accounting for a 19% share of the market. The Americas region accounted for 6% of South Africa's agricultural exports in 2024. The rest of the world, including the United Kingdom, accounted for 10% of the exports. In a nutshell, China's signalling the willingness to lower import tariffs is a welcome development. However, it will only become more substantial once more information becomes available. From a South African side, the relevant government departments should consider, through the local Embassy, sending an enquiry about unlocking this process. Ultimately, China is one of the focus areas in South Africa's long-term agricultural export diversification strategy, and any opportunity to further this plan should be pursued vigorously. Importantly, while China's offer looks generous, a country like South Africa needs to draw appropriate lessons from experience. Unilateral duty-free, quota-free market access is a double-edged sword: in the short to medium term, they can help a country increase the share of its exports in a significant market, but since these are not anchored in reciprocity, the largesse can disappear if there are frictions between the two parties, for example, over geopolitics. In short, non-reciprocal arrangements can lead to dependence and can easily be exploited by the benefactor as a means of political leverage to achieve strategic ends. While South Africa—and indeed African countries—should take advantage of this opportunity, we must aim to conclude a bilateral trade agreement with China that guarantees predictability and certainty and is durable. Wandile Sihlobo is chief economist of the Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa (Agbiz).