OpinionSiyabonga Hadebe|Published 7 hours agoSOUTH Africa’s high unemployment is not merely a problem of economics, which means economic solutions produced in isolation are ill-suited to address it.The issue lies in the fact that unemployment has been depoliticised, and this diverts the possibility of a new South African economic development model. The nation of ‘two economies’ cannot be dismantled by economists and their econometric models.This critique seeks to highlight that the roots of unemployment are political and structural, and the economic explanations of this phenomenon are simply out of sync and are unable to provide solutions.Economics, at its core, is a social arrangement that determines what to produce, when and how, including what to buy and consume. South Africa’s economic challenges demand an economic theory that refocuses reasoning in economics, that takes it back to its roots. It is a social science like philosophy, history, sociology and political science.This re-grounding is vital to equip economists to understand where the profession originates. Econometrics and statistical calculations should be tools to back up evidence rather than its core, as is currently the case.Each day, economists appear on television to discuss employment and propose “solutions” following a misdiagnosis that completely disregards this country’s economic and political histories. South Africa’s latest QLFS estimates unemployment to be over 33% and youth unemployment at just above 60%.These figures have generated a heated debate on whether statistics illegitimise the informal sector, suggesting the ‘true’ unemployment rate could be even below 10%. This is not a simple discussion since it concerns black labour that has been regarded as a commodity at the disposal of a white economy to exploit and dispose of at will.After more than 400 years since the establishment of a white-led economy at the Cape of Good Hope, the structural foundations of economic exclusion remain largely intact. Colonial conquest and the rise of settler capitalism entrenched a racial hierarchy of production and ownership that continues to shape South Africa’s political economy.The country’s economic foundations were built upon the systematic expropriation of black land, labour, and autonomy, ensuring that African participation in the economy occurred primarily on terms dictated by white capital.Africans were forcibly removed from their productive bases and absorbed into wage-labour systems designed to serve the interests of a white capitalist core. This transformation was not a natural process of economic development but a deliberate act of political engineering, institutionalised through legislation and coercive taxation.Policies such as the Hut Tax compelled Africans to seek wage employment in colonial enterprises. At the same time, the Master and Servant Acts criminalised breaches of labour contracts, effectively binding black workers to white employers. These measures laid the legal and economic foundation for the racialised labour regime that became central to South African capitalism.In Native Merchants: The Building of the Black Business Class in South Africa, Phakamisa Ndzamela traces the deep historical roots of black entrepreneurship, showing that Africans engaged in trade and enterprise long before colonial conquest formalised the racial division of labour.South Africa’s earliest black businesspeople in the Western Cape traded with Portuguese, British, and Dutch merchants from the late fifteenth century onwards, developing commercial networks that linked local production with emerging global markets.These early forms of African enterprise reveal that economic initiative and innovation were not foreign to black communities; instead, they were systematically undermined as settler colonialism consolidated its grip on resources and markets.Ndzamela also observes that black farmers in nineteenth-century Natal supplied wheat to Cape Town, demonstrating a degree of agricultural sophistication and commercial integration that challenged colonial stereotypes of African economic incapacity.However, their success was short-lived. Colonial administrations, threatened by black competition, imposed discriminatory policies, market restrictions and land dispossession that gradually forced these farmers out of business. In other words, African economic decline was not due to inefficiency or lack of effort but rather the result of deliberate exclusionary strategies designed to reserve profitable sectors for white settlers.Similarly, the Barolong people engaged in vibrant economic activity during precolonial mining in the northern Cape, but the rise of racial capitalism curtailed their advancement. Independent African entrepreneurs were soon converted into wage labourers as the mining economy expanded.The Northern Cape became central to South Africa’s emerging racialised industrial order. The 1860s discovery of diamonds in Kimberley marked a new phase of capitalist accumulation based on the uncompensated expropriation of black labour. The compound system and pass laws that followed institutionalised control, extracting labour while denying Africans property, capital and political rights.By the early 20th century, the dispossession of African producers was complete. Legislative measures such as the 1913 Natives Land Act formalised the exclusion of Africans from land ownership, consolidating their role as labourers within the mines and white-owned farms.The earlier vibrancy of black economic initiative, from the Natal farmers to the Barolong traders, was erased from the national memory, replaced by a narrative that portrayed Africans as unproductive or incapable of enterprise. This erasure served a political purpose: to justify the racial economic order that placed capital, property and industry under white control.This historical process created not only material inequalities but also deep psychological and institutional dependency that continues to shape post-apartheid South Africa. Centuries of dispossession and economic exclusion have left enduring scars on collective self-reliance and community organisation, producing a society where many remain structurally constrained from exercising genuine economic autonomy or ownership of productive resources.When people are denied the ability to follow their natural survival instincts, such as growing food, trading, or managing local resources, their economic agency is systematically suppressed. Colonial and apartheid interventions dismantled these everyday practices of self-sustenance, replacing them with dependence on wage labour and state-administered welfare.Over time, this has weakened the social foundations of creativity, resilience and self-determination. What was once an economy that centred communities became a fragmented social order, where survival depends largely on formal employment opportunities controlled by others.Today, economic and political narratives largely ignore this reality. The persistent unemployment crisis in South Africa is routinely described as a malfunction of the market, reduced to technical explanations that conceal its political roots. Those in the know claim that “the skills of the available workforce do not match the needs of the job market”, or that “the economy is not creating enough jobs to keep pace with population growth”.These explanations, while superficially logical, fail to acknowledge that unemployment was engineered through centuries of racial and spatial economic design. The question is not simply how to create more jobs but how to restore economic agency to the Black majority.Instead, contemporary economic thinking often mimics the very strategies once used to force black people into a dependent wage-earning class. Policies aimed at ‘labour absorption’ and ‘growth stimulation’ reproduce a system where capital owners and corporate interests mediate participation in the economy.This approach removes the possibility of autonomous production and community-based enterprise, keeping most black South Africans confined to the periphery of an economy that was never structured for their benefit.When people are prevented from following their natural instincts to sustain themselves, such as producing their own food or managing their own resources, what outcome can one expect? These basic instincts have been completely switched off. Even when people attempt to reclaim their independence, they are aggressively suppressed. This explains why black South Africans continue to struggle to build institutions, including businesses, that are vital for shaping their destiny.Reclaiming economic agency requires confronting the historical and structural conditions that continue to shape South Africa’s post-apartheid economy. The dominant frameworks of economic thought still privilege growth over justice and technical efficiency over historical redress.As a result, policies are designed to integrate the marginalised into a system that was never meant to serve them, rather than to transform that system itself. This means that the dominant logic of “inclusion” or “empowerment” unfairly asks those excluded to compete within an economy defined by their exclusion. This is the enduring contradiction of South Africa’s development model.True economic emancipation requires re-politicising the economy, recognising that markets, labour relations and ownership structures are political constructs, not neutral forces. Depoliticised discourse conceals power relations and frames unemployment as a technical malfunction while obscuring elite responsibility.The South African economic development model must prioritise community-based, cooperative and localised production. This should reawaken self-sustenance and dignity, grounding economic knowledge in history and social context and enabling policymakers to treat the economy as a human, relational system shaped by choices and values.At the end of the day, reclaiming economic agency for the Black majority means restoring control over production to the people themselves. It entails rebuilding local economies that serve human needs rather than capital accumulation and re-establishing the moral economy that once sustained African communities before the onset of extractive colonial capitalism.Until this re-politicisation takes place, South Africa’s unemployment crisis will persist, not as an economic failure per se, but as a symptom of an unresolved political question: who controls the means of production, and in whose interests does the economy function?Siyayibanga le economy!* Siyabonga Hadebe is an independent commentator based in Geneva on socio-economic, political and global matters.** The views expressed here do not reflect those of the Sunday Independent, Independent Media, or IOL.Get the real story on the go: Follow the Sunday Independent on WhatsApp.



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