Letter to Mahlamba Ndlopfu — Now is the winter of our discontent

Daily Maverick

20 hours ago

Ah, Chief Dwasaho! I write as one frozen stiff by the icy breath of our weather this week, which was worsened, not by cold fronts and damaging winds, but by the harsh realities revealed in the Statistics South Africa reports.
According to the latest figures from StatsSA, in the first quarter of 2025 our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew by a maiden 0.1% — yes, not a typo, not a rounding error, just a whisper of movement above economic rigor mortis. When annualised, that translates into a lukewarm 0.8% year-on-year.
The only warm patch came courtesy of agriculture, surging by 15.8%; clearly, cabbages are doing more heavy lifting than the Cabinet. If agriculture were a currency, I'd wager it has flourished under the recent sunshine of Baas John Steenhuisen's melanin-light leadership — though perhaps all it ever needed was a little brown boost in the soil and the soul.
So, my dearest leader, if our economy was the weather, it would be a bone-chilling fog bank rolling in from all sides with no visibility, no direction, and certainly no sunshine in sight. It is a climate where only those with thick skin and thicker wallets survive.
For the rest of us? It's winter without end, comrade. A cold front of missed opportunities blows through a nation still waiting for the warmth of the fundamental economic reforms promised in 2018, when I was 10kg lighter, with not a strand of grey hair. The need for immediate action is NOW.
Frostbitten
As I dived, nose first, into the frostbitten pages of StatsSA's latest Quarterly Labour Force Survey, I emerged gasping, winded not from the effort but from the sheer chill of our labour market's trajectory.
The official unemployment rate rose to a bone-cracking 32.9% in the first quarter of 2025, up from 31.9% in the last quarter of 2024. That's 8.2 million South Africans left out in the economic cold — up from 7.9 million — huddled around the dwindling embers of hope, awaiting a job to fall like manna from heaven.
The expanded unemployment rate, which includes discouraged jobseekers (like me), swelled to a stormy 43.1%. That's not an economy with 'low clouds' — that's a Category 5 unemployment cyclone bearing down on the nation, with little shelter in sight.
Gauteng added a gentle breeze of +9,000 jobs, while the Western Cape enjoyed a sunny spell with +49,000, and the Free State contributed a faint +4,000, a drizzle of progress.
But for the rest of Mzansi? It's all nightmarish: KwaZulu-Natal, Eastern Cape, North West, Limpopo, Mpumalanga, and the Northern Cape all reported job losses, a frostbite of opportunity. The stormfront hit the rural provinces hardest, where economic activity retreats like sunlight in mid-July.
Perhaps everyone has seized on the National Prosecuting Authority's snail-pace strategy to prosecute thieves in Gucci suits. But for minors, we hear the same story: to use KZN police commissioner Lieutenant- General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi's chilling words: 'Unfortunately, there's an engagement inside,' and the suspect was fatally wounded.
Economic Richter scale
Our economy is wobbling through yet another tremor, an earthquake clocking in at 5.6 on the economic Richter scale, just as the country flounders without a discernible compass.
The much-vaunted National Development Plan (NDP) 2030 remains a glossy wish list; the New Growth Path, launched by Ebrahim Patel in 2010, has long fizzled into policy vapour. And let's not even mention the Economic Reconstruction and Recovery Plan (ERRP) of 2020, a blueprint that has yet to see the light of day since its launch.
We've dwelt in this winter of our discontent since 2009 — that's 16 years of frost, shivering in the dark with no economic fruit in sight.
My leader, it has been a year since the markets heaved a collective sigh of relief following the cobbling together of the Government of National Unity (GNU). Investor confidence flickered, the rand strengthened, and — momentarily — the economic barometer pointed north.
But alas, no fresh economic policy has emerged from the fog.
Meanwhile, our industrial strategy (now a series of industry-specific master plans) continues to clash with the Treasury's fiscally (im)prudent stance, and the South African Reserve Bank remains fixated on inflation targeting, wielding high interest rates like a blunt snow shovel.
It's a jigsaw of clashing fronts, a high-pressure system of indecision, the crosswinds of ideology holding the country to ransom. In meteorological terms, this isn't merely a cold snap; it's a prolonged polar vortex: policies fracturing like ice sheets, implementation frozen stiff, and gale-force confusion sweeping through every sector.
And the question that keeps me awake in the long economic night is this: how do we find warmth when we can't even agree on the thermostat? The economy is the heartbeat of any democracy — and, dare I say, the very essence of the state.
Bleeding jobs
Yet it remains locked in a low-growth, high-interest-rate trap, bleeding jobs with every tick of the GDP clock. Are we not merely hoping the thermometer will fix the fever while the patient quietly slips into shock?
While I paced the lounge on a pallid Tuesday evening, contemplating ways to become an economic wizard, the anthracite fire sputtered with dirty yet oddly soothing warmth.
Suddenly, like a frost front through a broken window, a major newsbreak occurred: you, my leader, in all your infinite incandescence, have appointed an Eminent Persons Group. Wait for it: 'To guide and champion the National Dialogue.' Not to draft, not to deliver — to guide, like torchbearers in a tunnel with no exit.
Moreover, we're not stopping at one symbolic gathering. As Head of State, you are summoning all and sundry to a full-blown National Convention. One can only hope the guest list excludes Comrade Jimmy Manyi and his former boss uBaba kaDuduzane lest this turns into a Radical Economic Transformation revival festival.
The first sitting of this National Convention, scheduled for 15 August 2025, will set the agenda. Imagine! The second, pencilled in for January 2026, promises to 'reinforce our shared values and adopt a common vision and programme of action'. What does it mean?
In short, the Eminent Persons Group is like a cocktail: a retired judge mixing with a former apartheid politician, a peace activist, a Grand Slam champion, a rocket scientist, a mountain climber, unionists, and the odd former businessperson or two — all now expected to guide and champion our National Dialogue.
In weather terms, it's akin to entrusting the thermostat to a room full of thermometers — none of which agree on Fahrenheit or Celsius. Yet this isn't intended to draft an agenda — no, not at all. If it doesn't set the agenda, what does it mean to 'guide and champion'? Jobs are haemorrhaging, growth is nonexistent, and interest rates freeze whatever sizzle the economy once had.
Budgetary greenhouse
Meanwhile, on another planet entirely, we have assembled a budgetary greenhouse stocked with 400 members of the National Assembly, 90 from the National Council of Provinces, and a bloated Cabinet of 75 ministers and deputies. Yet the national agenda now rests on the shoulders of a hodgepodge of rugby captains, soccer coaches, ex-judges, clergy, and authors.
These noble souls are expected to steer our industrial, fiscal, monetary, and legislative future. Until 2026, this country will remain without a growth-inducing economic policy. Instead, our 'captains of sport and clergy' are expected to grind out the results of policymaking while inflation waltzes with the Treasury and the Reserve Bank storms through with hawkish winds.
All the while, the Democratic Alliance will persist with its courtroom battles dressed up as a moral crusade, trying to undo the very legislative frameworks that remain the ANC's only family silver after 31 years in power. Laws that were written by men and women who understood the demands of our Constitution, the need 'to heal' and the imperative 'to redress'. And these are the very words the DA finds offensive: heal and redress. If that's not an emergency, I am at a loss.
Comrade Leadership, why deploy 31 innocent souls when you already command a Cabinet twice that size? This isn't a participatory democracy; it's a bureaucratic iceberg — 90% protocol, 10% purpose, masking a freeze on real policy action.
The absurdity is staggering. Policy inertia and the endless punting of cans down the road of conventions won't win votes, nor will it heal the wounds of the present — let alone those of the past.