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Daily Maverick
29-05-2025
- Business
- Daily Maverick
New report reveals cost-of-living crisis deepening for South Africa's poor
From 2011 to 2023 the cost of living in South Africa has nearly doubled. This was revealed in the Trend in the Cost of Living in South Africa report, released on Friday, 16 May 2025. Electricity increases and food inflation are shown to be hitting poor and working-class households the hardest. A new report by the National Planning Commission (NPC) and Unicef (United Nations Children's Fund) reveals a troubling trend: while cumulative headline inflation rose by 94.6% between 2011 and 2023, the cost of essentials surged at a much faster rate. Electricity prices tripled, education costs more than doubled, and food prices climbed by 136.1%, far outpacing the growth in wages for poorer households. 'This report is not just about graphs and figures, it's not only about the cost of living. It is about the cost of being human — the cost of being a mother, a child, or a worker,' said Professor Julian May, a commissioner from the University of the Western Cape. May presented the findings to a room filled with officials from various government departments and civil society organisations on Friday, 16 May, highlighting both the improvements and challenges in addressing South Africa's cost-of-living crisis. The report aims to inform policies created through the National Development Plan (NDP). The NDP 2030, drafted in 2012 by the National Planning Commission, sets out to eliminate poverty and reduce unemployment by 2030. With the deadline for this long-term strategic plan approaching, the commission partnered with Unicef to update and deepen the analysis. 'This report is important for planning purposes and for informing policy with evidence,' said Professor Phakama Ntshongwana, a commissioner at the National Planning Commission. 'The different domains researched in this report are critical because they affect millions and millions of people in the country.' Cost of living essentials outpace everything else The report reveals that while general inflation nearly doubled prices over 12 years, essential goods and services increased far more sharply. Meanwhile, real wages — what people take home after adjusting for inflation — fell by 3.4%. In other words, the average South African worker could buy less in 2023 than in 2011. Electricity saw the most dramatic increase, rising by 230% over the 12-year period. With persistent load shedding and above-inflation tariff hikes, many poor households were forced to spend a disproportionate share of their income just to keep the lights on and cook meals. Food inflation hit the poorest the hardest. Staples like maize meal and cooking oil experienced steep price increases, with overall food and non-alcoholic beverage inflation at 136.1%. These are not luxury goods but the backbone of sustenance for South Africa's poor. As a consequence, households were forced to cut back on food spending. May said some even went as far as skipping meals or relying on cheap, nutrient-poor alternatives to survive. Transport costs also rose sharply, especially for those reliant on minibus taxis or buses. With public transport inflation estimated at about 130%, and private transport closer to 165%, commuting to work or school became unaffordable for many. While education is often hailed as a pathway out of poverty, it has become less accessible over the past 12 years. Education costs increased by 138% overall, and primary and secondary school fees rose even faster. The report shows that it is no longer just about access, but affordability. The soaring cost of essentials was only exacerbated by the fact that real wages declined by 3.4% between 2011 and 2023. For many low-income workers, each year brought less purchasing power. Despite the introduction of a national minimum wage, wage growth lagged far behind inflation in essentials, squeezing household budgets even tighter. Challenges to Achieving NDP Goals Ntshongwana noted that while there have been pockets of improvement, the report highlights significant challenges to the National Planning Commission's goal of meeting key objectives in the National Development Plan. 'We are not much closer to the goals of the NDP. There are pockets of improvement, but much remains to be done regarding policy delivery and improving quality of life for children, women, and society as a whole,' he said. She also pointed to South Africa's spatial patterns — a legacy of apartheid spatial planning where non-white people were removed from urban areas and placed in townships on the periphery — as a strong impediment to improving the quality of life for the poorest communities. 'With low-income people living far away from economic hubs where they can access jobs, there comes the question of their job-seeking patterns, with transport costs playing a huge role in their ability to access employment,' Ntshongwana said. The value of social grants The report highlights that social grants have become a critical lifeline for a large portion of South Africa's population amid rising living costs and economic challenges. In 2023, Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice and Dignity released a statement revealing that about 93% of grant money is spent on food, underscoring the grant's role in mitigating the impact of soaring prices on poor households. The Trends in the Cost of Living report found that between 2011 and 2023, social assistance in South Africa expanded, with the number of grants paid out by the government in the same period. However, the report found that the real value of grants declined over the assessment period when compared to the headline CPI, particularly for the old age grant, war veterans grant, disability grant, and care dependency grant Despite their importance, the report argues that social grants alone are insufficient to fully offset the rising costs of essentials, leaving many people vulnerable to ongoing economic pressures. However, Mervyn Abrahams, a programme coordinator at Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice and Dignity, said his organisation was working on a research project advocating for social grants to be set above the upper-bound poverty line to adequately address the cost of living crisis. 'If you set it below, it will only be used to sustain life — to pay for food, transport, and the like. But if it's set above, it allows some level of decision-making as to what the grant beneficiary will do with the extra R200 or R300. They can then start to question how they can invest the extra money to create some kind of income stream for themselves,' Abrahams said. He added that the two-year research project found that 67 of the 100 grant beneficiaries involved used the money to develop alternative income streams, such as growing extra food and selling it, thus alleviating some of the pressures of the cost-of-living crisis. DM
Daily Maverick
29-05-2025
- Politics
- Daily Maverick
SA's National Development Plan 2030 — a laudable, but naive vision that's far from fruition
We are five years from the South Africa imagined in the National Development Plan (NDP) that was presented to Parliament in August 2012. The NDP was accepted unanimously by legislators and endorsed by the executive. Disclosure: I left the secretariat of the National Planning Commission (NPC) 10 years and a couple of months ago. I played a minuscule role in its formulation. I think 10 years is long enough for a self-imposed gardening leave. I have a lot of respect for most of the people who put together that first NDP under the leadership of Cyril Ramaphosa and Trevor Manuel. I write now as a complete outsider, and wilfully emerge from a veil of ignorance; I write as if I know little to nothing (which is about right in almost every aspect). There are very many parts of the plan that are open for questioning, scrutiny and evaluation. The thing that has struck me most about the NDP and the NPC in general is how little most of us know about the workings of the commission. Perhaps I have not paid enough attention, but I don't recall any public service announcement or statement about progress with implementation. I want to believe that the woman in Cofimvaba has seen a marked improvement in the lives of her family. The NPC needs to come out and provide an honest appraisal of their work; their successes and failures… They might not convince everyone of any successes. Do it, and they'll regret it. Don't do it, and they will also regret it. So do it, anyway. Among our compatriots are people who are unwilling to accept that two things can be true at the same time, and remind me of the Orwellian observation, 'However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back.' Never mind. Let me start this discussion with the easy part: the Vision Statement. I'm probably opening up space for vitriol and vituperation, mantric claims, rhetoric and cant about corruption, incompetence, State Capture, Phala Phala — which are all valid, mind you, but very often stem from a cruel gloating and dancing on South Africa's grave. The vision part is important. I previously discussed the lack of vision (on the part, first of colonists in the late 19th century, settler-colonists in the 20th century, and African nationalists after 1994) in the context of Johannesburg's crumbling inner city. The vision stated in the NDP 2030 is laudable, but as I have come to learn, it's naive and has counted too much on goodwill and trust among the population. Of all the things that have gone wrong or turned sour in South Africa, trust is our greatest loss. Whenever I write about these things, I should always remind the reader that I am profoundly pessimistic — not just about South Africa. To paraphrase Dante, each day starts, at least for me, with accepting that I have to abandon all hope. 2030: A country remade The vision statement is a lengthy and prosaic declaration. At the lowest point of my day, I think of it as verging on mythopoetic because it relies so heavily on myth, hypothesis and romantic-utopianism. Utopianism can be good. It is dangerous when it is coupled with romanticism… Anyway, the opening passage of the Vision Statement reads: 'Now in 2030 we live in a country which we have remade. We have created a home where everybody feels free yet bounded to others; where everyone embraces their full potential. We are proud to be a community that cares.' Fifty million of us, infants and toddlers included, would probably like to be happy and prosper in that society. But the political-economic part is where our wish-dreams, kind of, fall apart: ' Through our service we show our solidarity. We enjoy the same quality of service. We are connected through our caring. The beating heart of our country is a community that has all the enablers of modern life: We have water. We use a toilet. We have food on the table. We fall asleep without fear. We listen to the rain on the roof. We gather together in front of heat. 'What we contribute in our taxes, we get back through the high quality of our public services. That is why we have: Good clinics and hospitals with well trained, caring doctors, administrators, nurses who rush to our aid with empathy and expertise; Affordable effective medicines, because they were made for all of us; Good schools with well educated, trained and caring teachers.' I don't believe that these latter, especially political matters and matters of professionalism and caring, have moved the length of a single breath towards Vision 2030. From Mitchells Plain to Diepkloof, from Shoshanguve, KwaZakhele, Zwide, Inanda to KwaMashu, you would be hard pressed to find a teacher who is well qualified (these data are a bit outdated, but things have become worse) or a nurse who takes care of a patient with empathy. I had major surgery a year ago, and was terrified by the lack of empathy and professionalism of the nursing staff. I remember having very major surgery at the old Coronationville Hospital (Rahima Moosa Mother and Child Hospital) in 1979, and at night the nurses (all black) would do rounds, quietly, with care and a sense of responsibility, checking on patients. Last year, while I was recuperating from surgery, nurses held conversations, loud and across 20m spaces, dropping needles and trays of instruments. Air bubbles in sacks of intravenous fluids and tubes were probably harmless, but frightening nonetheless… I was more scared of the nursing care than I was of the major surgery I had had. That was a personal experience, but recall the patient abuse at Tonga Hospital in Nkomazi, Mpumalanga, reported by the SABC in March. Nurses also get abused by patients. What incidents like these suggest is a lack of caring, of empathy and of respect and trust. We don't trust the police, we don't trust teachers, we don't trust nurses. Doctors and nurses are simply packing up and leaving the country. The data show the extent of the emigration. Data from Statistics Canada show that between January 2020 and July 2024, that country issued 7,781 temporary work permits to South Africans, 600 of whom were healthcare professionals, with around 350 being specialists like cardiologists, neurologists and emergency physicians. That was data from only one source. So much, then, for the 'good clinics and hospitals with well trained, caring doctors, administrators, nurses who rush to our aid with empathy and expertise' or 'good schools with well educated, trained and caring teachers'. There are many more elements of the vision that can be weighed up against the life world (the entirety of the experienced world of people across society) of South Africans. We must, necessarily, wait for two things. First, we have to ask the NPC to sit down and tell the public, not in the closed confines of Parliamentary committees where braskap and tall poppy syndrome are the rules of engagement. Second, we have to wait for 2030, five years from now, to reach what the NPC vision stated. It is worth presenting it here, more fully: 'The welfare of each of us is the welfare of all. Everybody lives longer. We experience fulfilment in life, living it in the successful society we are creating. We feel prosperous. Our connectedness across time and distance is the central principle of our nationhood. We are a people who have come together and shared extraordinarily to remake our society.' And 'We know our leaders as we have elected them and pledged them into office: They are wise in the use of our wealth; Wise in knowing and understanding our wishes and needs; Wise in expecting us to express ourselves to them in any appropriate manner we have agreed to be allowable; Wise in not silencing those who criticise, but enable them, through our rules of engagement, to be even more rigorous in supporting a just society. 'Our leaders' wisdom is ours, because we sense our wisdom in theirs. Someone who is better qualified than me should try to explain all of that. The only good thing that can be said today is that we have another five years to get much of this vision to come to fruition. DM
News24
07-05-2025
- Politics
- News24
‘Read the political room': Experts call for review of SA's foreign policy
Experts believe South Africa's foreign policy needs an urgent overhaul. Dr Siphamandla Zondi, one of the four commissioners of the National Planning Commission, has also recommended re-establishing the South African Council on International Relations. On Wednesday, he briefed Parliament about South Africa's foreign policy. To help South Africa navigate an increasingly volatile international community, the decommissioned South African Council on International Relations should be re-established to strategically attract diplomatic value. This is according to Dr Siphamandla Zondi, one of the four commissioners of the National Planning Commission (NPC). On Wednesday, the NPC briefed the Portfolio Committee on International Relations and Cooperation on how South Africa can optimise its chairing of global forums and institutions. In a year that South Africa holds the presidency of the G20, the presentation by the NPC becomes critical to guide processes on how the country can fully take advantage of its position. 'We need to update our foreign policy framework continuously. We always have to do so, so that we can do this game a little better. We need to strengthen parliamentary oversight of international engagements, not a general policy or foreign policy perspectives, but these big things that cost a lot that can benefit us a lot,' Zondi said. According to Zondi, Parliament needs to assist the government to become more strategic about its international engagements and policies. 'We may need a foreign policy forum of some sort, such as the Kigali Dialogue. India has it (a dialogue), Brazil has it and they use them very strategically to attract some value. We may need to re-establish the de-established South African Council on International Relations. It was very useful as it brought former diplomats together with experts in international relations and some parliamentarians and members of government to discuss what is the significance for us. 'This is what has been helping the European Foreign Policy Council, the US Foreign Policy Council. They help them think through all of these things,' he said. Furthermore, Zondi said the Department of International Relations and Cooperation's research unit needed to be strengthened. 'You need to strengthen this because they really do help us manage long-term benefits. We need a clear communications and branding strategy beyond just events and we need more sector-specific studies. We need more studies to be done in this area to look at very specific things like this G20 this year. It will require a study to look at how much did it cost us, both financially and non-financially, and how much does it benefit us,' Zondi said. MK Party MP Wesley Douglas said the government needed to turn the focus of the country's foreign policy towards the economy. 'We need to ensure that every cent we spend helps us to create more job opportunities. Rwanda and several other African countries are leading the pack on the economic front. We are part of BRICS, and there is so little trade with these countries. READ | Trump's executive order 'lacks factual accuracy', says Lamola in parliamentary reply 'China is awaiting on SA businesses to come and to be a part of trade shows and invest in the country. This is political suicide. Most of our trade is with the West, Europe and the US. We need to focus on the Global South again, and we need to read the political room. Our government seems more interested in cutting ribbons and holding events,' Douglas said. EFF MP Nqobile Matilda Mhlongo spoke of the trade deals the government signs with other countries. Mhlongo added: We don't know the benefits of these deals, but we are signing them everywhere. It seems that when we host these big events, they're hosted in either Cape Town or Johannesburg, but we are leaving behind the rural areas. There are beautiful towns with conference facilities, and a high standard of services Mhlongo said South Africa's investment in diplomacy should have tangible benefits. 'We have seen how the FIFA World Cup in 2010, more than 15 years later, benefits us, because we have stadiums and infrastructure which we are still using and enjoying. The stadiums are full for soccer games. It (infrastructure) is being used to create revenue for the country, there are vendors selling goods and foods outside the stadiums, there are other events creating money. That is what we need for our diplomacy,' she said.
