South African unemployment rate dips under coalition government

By Kopano Gumbi

PRETORIA (Reuters) -South Africa's unemployment rate fell in the three months after the formation of a coalition government that has boosted business confidence and led to hopes for more progress on economic reform, data showed on Tuesday.

The official unemployment rate fell to 32.1% in the third quarter of 2024, from 33.5% in the second quarter, the first time the official rate had fallen in a year, Statistics South Africa figures showed.

The coalition government was formed in June after the African National Congress lost its parliamentary majority for the first time in 30 years, pushing it into a broad alliance with the market-friendly Democratic Alliance and other smaller parties.

Investor optimism over the coalition fuelled a rally in the country's rand currency and local-currency debt.

The decline in joblessness in the latest three-month period was driven by rising employment in six of the 10 industries tracked by the statistics agency: community and social services, construction, trade, agriculture, mining and utilities.

There were job losses in transport, manufacturing, private households and finance.

However, South Africa still has one of the highest unemployment rates in the world, and Black South Africans continue to experience the worst unemployment levels relative to the country's other racial groups.

Statistician-General Risenga Maluleke told a press conference that the long-term unemployment rate had risen more than 10 percentage points in the last decade, rooted in a mismatch between people's skills and the jobs on offer.

Under an expanded definition of unemployment, which includes those discouraged from seeking work, 41.9% of the labour force was jobless in the third quarter, down from 42.6% in the second.

(Reporting by Kopano Gumbi; Additional reporting by Tannur Anders; Editing by Alexander Winning and Alex Richardson)