South Africa does not have an unemployment problem. It has a job creation problem.

That distinction matters.

The latest unemployment figures from Statistics South Africa should disturb every South African but they should not surprise us. The official unemployment rate is now 33.6%, representing approximately 8.5 million people actively looking for work and unable to find it. The broader measure, which includes people who want to work but have stopped looking, stands at 43.8%.

That gap is not a technical detail. It represents millions of people who have become detached from the labour market because they no longer believe that searching for work will lead to a job.

But there is a bigger question we need to ask. Why, after more than three decades of democracy, does our economy still fail to create enough productive employment for the people who need it?

South Africa’s working-age population is now approximately 42.3 million. Yet only about 16.7 million people are employed. More than half of the working-age population is therefore outside employment. More than 21 million people of working-age are under 35. This should be our demographic dividend. Instead, we are watching an entire generation struggle to enter the economy.

And this crisis is not new.

In 1993 and 1994, broad unemployment was already around 29% to 31%. After 1994, there was genuine improvement. Between 2003 and 2007, driven by a global commodities boom and massive public investment ahead of the 2010 FIFA World Cup, the economy grew at 5% annually. By 2007, official unemployment fell to around 22%, its lowest level in the post 1994 era. Over a million formal jobs were created.

Those jobs were real. People earned wages, paid taxes and built livelihoods. That period matters because it proves a fundamental point: when growth, investment and demand align, South Africa can create jobs at scale.

The tragedy is that those gains were built on temporary tailwinds rather than permanent structural strength. When the global financial crisis hit in 2008 and major infrastructure projects wrapped up, the momentum vanished. Over a million jobs disappeared in under two years. The underlying structural weaknesses of our economy were laid bare.

By 2021, expanded unemployment reached 46.2%. Today, it remains above 40%. Our failure was not that the 2007 progress was an illusion but that we failed to turn temporary economic tailwinds into a durable, self sustaining, job creating economy.

This brings us to one of the most persistent explanations for unemployment: the skills mismatch.

Of course, South Africa needs better education, stronger technical training and more relevant skills. But skills alone cannot solve an employment crisis. We can train graduates indefinitely but a skill only has economic value when there is an enterprise ready to buy it.

A young person can have a degree, diploma or technical qualification and remain unemployed if the economy is not creating businesses, factories, infrastructure projects and industries that require those skills. At some point, we have to stop asking only whether South Africans are employable and start asking whether the economy is creating enough employment opportunities. Right now, it is not.

Businesses face high energy costs, growing water challenges, logistics constraints, expensive capital and regulatory complexity. Policies and regulatory requirements can also increase the cost, uncertainty and risk associated with investment and expansion. These are not abstract economic concepts. They affect whether a business opens another factory, expands production, employs another 50 people, or decides not to invest at all.

And without investment, there is no sustained job creation.

This is why our response must go beyond another employment summit or another policy document. We need to make it easier and less risky to invest, produce and employ. We need public spending to generate economic activity and infrastructure rather than simply sustain administration. We need sustained investment in manufacturing, agriculture, energy, logistics, technology and other productive sectors capable of absorbing people at scale.

Universities have a role to play too. Higher education cannot become an assembly line producing graduates whose primary economic strategy is to submit CV after CV. But we must be careful not to place the burden of an economic failure on young people. You cannot educate your way out of an economy that is not creating enough jobs.

For more than 30 years, South Africa has diagnosed its unemployment crisis. We know the numbers. We know the consequences. We have produced strategies, frameworks, summits and policy documents. What we have not produced is an economy capable of consistently creating employment at the scale required by our population.

That is the uncomfortable truth. The numbers are no longer asking for another diagnosis. They are demanding execution. South Africa does not need another promise that jobs will come. We need an economy capable of creating them.

Mapule Mphaki is CEO of Tecra Manufacturing, Non Executive Chair of Lindham Group Zambia