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IOL News
26-05-2025
- Business
- IOL News
SA's Jobs Crisis: A Reflection of Capitalism's Failures
Members of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) hold placards and shout slogans in support of a nationwide demonstration in Durban on February 13, 2019. The ANC has failed to prioritize job creation in its economic policies, says the writer. Image: AFP Dr Trevor Ngwane Are South Africans looking for a sign? After 30 years of democratic governance, millions of working-class and poor people continue to await the promised benefits of liberation after decades of struggle. Some are losing hope that meaningful change will occur for themselves and their children. There are still far too many continuities of oppression and exploitation from the past. Statistician-General Risenga Maluleke's recent release of the country's unemployment figures may be the sign the masses have been waiting for. He informed the nation that approximately 12 million workers are unemployed, with youth aged 15 to 24 bearing the brunt of the crisis. About 3.2 million of them are idling at home, neither working nor attending educational institutions. Their future is bleak. Is the unemployment crisis in South Africa a sign that the economic system is failing, that our society is unviable, and that we are staring into the abyss of a social apocalypse? Using the expanded definition of unemployment, 43,1% of workers were unemployed in the first quarter of 2025, marking a 1.2-percentage-point increase from the previous quarter. Conditions are worsening, not improving. This suggests systemic failure, indicating that the economy is broken and unsustainable. The unemployment rate is not merely a statistic; it is a crime scene. Unemployment represents a form of structural violence. Daily life poses a challenge for the majority of people. Everything becomes a problem when you are both unemployed and poor: food, water, electricity, housing, healthcare, education, transport, and so on. Deprivation and destitution define your existence, leaving you perpetually on the brink of despair and hopelessness. At times, it seems as though there is neither a present nor a future. Hardship and suffering have been normalized in post-apartheid South Africa. Unemployment is not the worst of the morbid symptoms found in a society caught at a crossroads in its history. Post-war Germany and the USA faced a similar predicament in the 1930s following the 1929 Great Depression: mass unemployment, economic despair, and a crisis of legitimacy in their respective political systems. Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Advertisement Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Next Stay Close ✕ Hitler led the Volk down the path of fascism, providing them with scapegoats and authoritarianism. Roosevelt adhered to the democratic course, presenting a vision of hope and reform. Hitler directed Germany toward war and disaster, while Roosevelt steered the USA toward reforming capitalism through a bold program of public works, financial regulation, and social safety nets. Since the 2008 global economic meltdown, a crisis rooted in neoliberal capitalism, the world has been plunged into uncertainty, insecurity, and instability. Once again, the world finds itself at a crossroads. Under President Trump, the U.S. government drives a populist right-wing shift in global politics. There is a movement to retreat from liberal democracy and the globalization agenda of neoliberalism. Governments and political leaders are forced to choose which path to take. This choice is often framed as democracy versus authoritarianism, multilateralism versus unilateralism, open trade versus protectionism, the Global North versus the Global South, etc. At the heart of it all lies the question of how to survive and thrive as nations, classes, and individuals amid the conditions of a capitalist crisis. The system has long passed its expiration date. Every capitalist government or enterprise strives to save itself, maintain its economic power, and shift the burden of the crisis onto others. South Africa finds itself in this predicament. In its 30 years of governance, the ANC has failed to extract the country from the ongoing dysfunctions of racial capitalism, including a low growth rate, a small domestic market, the non-beneficiation of its mineral resources, and a high unemployment rate, to name just a few of its shortcomings. It is fair to say that the ANC came to power during a challenging economic period. The 1940-1970 Golden Age of Capitalism, marked by significant economic growth, high productivity, low unemployment, and prosperity for Western European and East Asian countries, had long since ended, and neoliberalism took hold. Contrary to the Freedom Charter, the ANC was never allowed to seize 'the commanding heights of the economy'; instead, ANC leaders accepted the dominance of neoliberal ideology without resistance. From all accounts, neoliberalism devastated the South African economy, fulfilling its agenda of making the rich richer and the poor Africa lost millions of jobs due to the opening of the economy by World Trade Organization policy; manufacturing was nearly decimated by the ANC's eagerness to embrace unfettered global trade; billions of rands exited the country when the ANC removed exchange controls; the economy was nearly suffocated by the South African Reserve Bank's high interest rates and dogmatic inflation targeting. These misguided policies have contributed to unemployment. The ANC has failed to prioritize job creation in its economic policies. It has been timid when faced with vested interests that sought to benefit from the country's economic resources at the expense of the working class and the poor.
The Star
22-05-2025
- Politics
- The Star
All you need to know about Zingiswa Losi: The woman who schooled Donald Trump on South Africa
Zingiswa Losi, the president of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), delivered a pointed response to US president Donald Trump's controversial remarks on South African land reform and violence against white farmers during a high-level meeting at the White House on Tuesday. Losi, the country's first female president of COSATU, joined president Cyril Ramaphosa as part of a delegation aiming to strengthen diplomatic and economic ties between the two nations. Trump used the opportunity to repeat long-standing, debunked claims of 'systematic killings' of white farmers, raising alarm over land expropriation policies in South Africa. She countered his narrative with a clear message: crime in South Africa is a universal scourge, not a racially targeted phenomenon. "The problem in South Africa is not necessarily about race, but it's about crime," Losi told Trump. "Black men and women in our rural communities are just as many victims of brutal crimes as anyone else." Born in 1975 in KwaZakhele, Eastern Cape, Losi began her activism in the anti-apartheid struggle, inspired by her politically active family. She served in the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) from 1996 to 1999 before joining Ford Motor Company in Port Elizabeth, where she became a shop steward for the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA). Her rise within the labour movement was steady. She served as COSATU's second deputy president from 2009 and became its first female president in 2018, securing re-election in 2022.
The Guardian
22-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Ramaphosa withstood Trump's bizarre ambush – but he let down South Africans
The dust is still settling from Donald Trump's latest 'ambush' in the Oval Office. What started off as a series of pleasantries about golf between the US president and South African president Cyril Ramaphosa's delegation quickly turned into a lecture – complete with a video screening and reams of printed-out news articles – about how a white genocide is supposedly under way in my home country. The delegation was largely successful in correcting that narrative. It emphasised that crime affects South Africans of all races and that white citizens are not specifically targeted. Zingiswa Losi, president of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, rightly pointed out that in rural areas, it is Black women who bear the brunt of violent crime. On the surface, this might all seem like a familiar conflict – one between Trump's deluded and emboldened hard-right vision of the world and a country's leadership trying its best to stick to the facts without aggrieving the beast too much (South Africa is still facing 30% tariffs, after all). But as an investigative journalist and researcher who focuses on land dispossession and reform in South Africa, to me the encounter looked different. All I could see was a missed opportunity. One spark for this ongoing showdown between the Maga movement in the US (allied with some white Afrikaners in South Africa) and the African National Congress (ANC) government has been the introduction of a land reform act that was passed in January. The law aims to address the inequalities of the white-minority-rule era by tackling an issue that has been ignored for too long in post-apartheid South Africa and lies at the root of many of our problems: land. To explain why, let me return to the subject of golf – a subject that feels all the more appropriate given that, at Trump's request, Ramaphosa's delegation included professional golfers Ernie Els and Retief Goosen. I've written extensively about golf courses and golf estates. Take the suburb of Fourways in northern Johannesburg, which contains some of the most exclusive and luxurious golf estates in the country. With homes that sell for tens of millions of rands, these enclaves serve South Africa's wealthy elite. Among their many amenities such as private lagoons, nature trails, sports fields and high-end restaurants, the most coveted is safety. In a city with high rates of car hijackings and home invasions, their surveillance systems, access control and electrified perimeter walls offer peace of mind that is a luxury in Johannesburg. Inside those walls lies a world largely insulated from the realities of South Africa – a world that is overwhelmingly white, even though more than 80% of the South African population is Black. Before Fourways became a hub of luxury living, it was an agricultural region made up of farms and smallholdings. The land was seized in the 19th century by Afrikaner settlers who forced the original Black residents into labour tenancies. Stripped of land rights, those tenants could only stay on their ancestral land if they worked it for the settlers. In the 1980s, as apartheid began to falter and the prospect of democracy grew, many white landowners sold their farms to private developers and fled the area or the country. The labour tenants were left behind, only to be forcibly relocated to underresourced townships such as Alexandra and Soweto. They lost not just their homes and livelihoods but also family graves and burial plots that could not be moved. Some 30 years into democracy, the former labour tenants of Fourways, like the majority of South African land claimants, are still trapped in a backlogged, corrupted land-claims process with their hope dwindling that they'll ever be granted compensation or restoration of their land rights. This is why it's so tragic that Ramaphosa's team has been framing the failure of land reform as proof of successful race relations. It's as if they're effectively saying: 'Look – there can be no 'white genocide' in South Africa because white people own 72% of farmland!' This is factually correct. However, our inability to redistribute land, and thus create a more equitable and sustainable South Africa, is not a marker of national unity. It is the ANC's most glaring policy failure, one the government is only belatedly trying to fix with this controversial law. The crowded, impoverished townships where the state relocated Black South Africans under the Group Areas Act remain among the most dangerous places in the country. Generations of South Africans have been cut off from the wealth-building power of land ownership. Here's the key point: this economic exclusion, combined with mass unemployment, fuels the very crime that the delegation insisted affects everyone equally. I appreciate that it may not have been the right occasion and Trump was probably not a receptive audience for a nuanced conversation. Still, it saddens me to think of the resources poured into this mission to correct the damage being wrought by a malicious, white supremacist agenda in South Africa and the US. Meanwhile the historically dispossessed South Africans who need these resources most are left to flounder, overlooked as the true victims of the violence of the apartheid regime and the dark shadow it has cast over our young democracy. Most Black South Africans will never be able to afford to move to areas such as Fourways. They live in places the government once designated for removal, with limited access to jobs, safety or infrastructure. They are the ones most exposed to violent crime, not those living in fortified golf estates and large fortified farms. Zanele Mji is a writer, investigative journalist and podcaster based in Johannesburg, South Africa
IOL News
22-05-2025
- Politics
- IOL News
All you need to know about Zingiswa Losi: The woman who schooled Donald Trump on South Africa
Zingiswa Losi: The woman who challenged Donald Trump on South Africa. Image: Simphiwe Mbokazi/African News Agency/ANA Zingiswa Losi, the president of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), delivered a pointed response to US president Donald Trump's controversial remarks on South African land reform and violence against white farmers during a high-level meeting at the White House on Tuesday. Losi, the country's first female president of COSATU, joined president Cyril Ramaphosa as part of a delegation aiming to strengthen diplomatic and economic ties between the two nations. Trump used the opportunity to repeat long-standing, debunked claims of 'systematic killings' of white farmers, raising alarm over land expropriation policies in South Africa. She countered his narrative with a clear message: crime in South Africa is a universal scourge, not a racially targeted phenomenon. "The problem in South Africa is not necessarily about race, but it's about crime," Losi told Trump. "Black men and women in our rural communities are just as many victims of brutal crimes as anyone else." Born in 1975 in KwaZakhele, Eastern Cape, Losi began her activism in the anti-apartheid struggle, inspired by her politically active family. She served in the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) from 1996 to 1999 before joining Ford Motor Company in Port Elizabeth, where she became a shop steward for the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA). Her rise within the labour movement was steady. She served as COSATU's second deputy president from 2009 and became its first female president in 2018, securing re-election in 2022. Beyond her union leadership, Losi has played key roles in the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP), championing workers' rights and economic transformation. She is also president of the Southern African Trade Union Coordinating Council (SATUCC), representing unions across the SADC region. On Tuesday, Losi used her platform to call for cooperation, not division. "We are here to say: how do we, both nations, work together to reset, to really talk about investment but also help to address the levels of crime?" she said. IOL Politics Get your news on the go, click here to join the IOL News WhatsApp channel.
IOL News
21-05-2025
- Politics
- IOL News
‘Arrest Malema, ' Trump tells Ramaphosa
US President Donald Trump welcomes South African President Cyril Ramaphosa to the White House in Washington, DC, on May 21, 2025. Ramaphosa meets Trump amid tensions over Washington's resettlement of white Afrikaners that the US president claims are the victims of "genocide." What began as a routine diplomatic meeting intended to reset US-South Africa relations quickly descended into a tense confrontation as President Donald Trump pressed South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on the controversial topic of 'white genocide' and land reform in his country. Held at the White House on Wednesday, the bilateral meeting featured high-level South African officials and business figures, including Cabinet ministers Parks Tau, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, Ronald Lamola, DA leader John Steenhuisen, labour federation COSATU's Zingisa Losi, and billionaire Johann Rupert. However, the delegation's composition, which even included professional golfer Ernie Els, sparked criticism back home for lacking key government figures and skewing toward elite business interests. As cameras rolled in the Oval Office, Trump wasted no time diving into the inflammatory topic. He opened with graphic videos and clips of EFF leader Julius Malema, including footage of rallies where the chant 'Kill the Boer' was heard — a moment that set the tone for the rest of the meeting. 'We've seen a tremendous number of white farmers fleeing South Africa,' Trump said. 'We believe people are being persecuted, and we take that seriously.' According to sources close to the meeting, Trump even demanded to know why Malema 'hasn't been arrested,' calling him 'an idiot.' He also cited what he claimed were rising numbers of Afrikaner asylum seekers and a surge in emigration as proof of a crisis. The spectacle was reminiscent of Trump's past confrontational encounters with world leaders, including a now-infamous clash with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. But unlike Zelensky, Ramaphosa remained composed. Ramaphosa rejected the narrative of white-targeted violence as a gross misrepresentation. 'Yes, there are challenges with crime, but they affect all South Africans — black and white alike,' he said, while pointing out that the 'Kill the Boer' chant was the rhetoric of minority opposition voices and not reflective of national policy.
