Thomas Johnson - The Blog

The following explanation for South Africa's persistently high unemployment was posted on Reddit/AskSocialScience substack by a University of Cape Town MPhil PPE student. It's one of the more cogent I've encountered and unlike the trite reasons offered by government, media and mainstream analysts: This is a bit of a simplification, but essentially, the problem boils down to one of labour absorption: the private sector in SA is too small to employ the entire South African labour force.  The reason for this can be traced back to the early development of the South African economy, specifically during the colonial and subsequent Apartheid era.  Early industry in SA (here meaning mining) was developed around the exploitation of African labour, which was used as a readily available source of cheap labour to man a labour-intensive industry. Subsequent government policy largely backed this approach, setting up institutions like the homelands system as a means to provide a ready sou...

Politicians take credit for the good news they're not responsible for, but don't take blame when they are.  So it is that periodically the DA takes credit for the Western Cape having a lower unemployment rate than SA as a whole https://www.da.org.za/2024/05/western-cape-and-cape-town-have-the-best-jobs-and-service-delivery-record-in-south-africa-statssa. Misinterpreting the job data, they take credit for the number of employed persons that increased between their arbitrary reference periods (I suspect cherry picking when the data is favourable). They claim they are responsible for "new jobs" being "created" (https://www.gov.za/news/media-statements/western-cape-stats-sa-quarterly-labour-force-survey-30-oct-2018) and the province's or Cape Town's "upward economic trajectory" and so on.  These claims are unprovable, specious and even false. At best it's a chronic misunderstanding of how the economy works, which SA's politicians don...

Cape Town councillor Jack Miller's media release on DA speaker Felicity Purchase's ejecting him from council for using term "migrant": Thank you to everyone for the support! Yes, I am doing perfectly fine. And yes, it is true that I was thrown out of the Cape Town City Council earlier for using the word "migrant". On behalf of a local community in Cape Town I was giving a speech and raising an objection over some of the concerns that this community had. They were worried that the project's objective to build low-cost housing would not go to local residents, but rather would be allocated to economic migrants coming in from the Eastern Cape. This is a concern we have heard on countless occasions in our community work across Cape Town over the last two decades. I am not concerned that the EFF or the ANC took offense to the content of my speech. I am not there to keep them happy. I am there to share real life stories and issues from and for the people of the...

There's a short YouTube video of Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis standing outside the civic centre holding pages he says is Stats SA's Quarterly Labour Force Survey. The video's title is "DA creates 86,000 jobs".  Looking like a pupil who won a medal for good marks, unable to contain himself, he points to a page and says Cape Town has 86,000 more jobs than - I didn't get which period - last quarter or last year.  Recently mayco for economic development James Vos similarly wrote in an advertorial they - he, DA and city - are personally responsible for the city's upward "economic trajectory". Little to no credit for citizens and business who actually do the work.  The DA keep making these unfounded, unprovable claims that they "created" x number new jobs in the Western Cape and Cape Town over a period. When Hill-Lewis was the DA's finance spokesman, he made a speech in Parliament claiming such. I emailed asking for evidence, which...

 The shit-show in the Oval Office last week where Donald Trump confronted the South African delegation led by Cyril Ramaphosa put the world's attention on an inconvenient truth SA society, that is, in particular ANC, ANC government, leftwing public intellectuals and mainstream media, prefer remain unspoken and unchallenged. From president to press, the left has reacted with outrage repudiating the 50 Afrikaner refugees to the US. They say the victimhood these people claim, a tiny minority of the Afrikaner population, is false.  But the left are the last to talk about fake victimhood. Just recently Ramaphosa was in Eastern Cape blaming the poor state of services on apartheid. And, they say, white males occupy most management positions which they're going to stop. Apartheid, the gift that keeps on giving. I once chatted with an Afrikaner, an acquaintance, about this and that. I incidentally mentioned the book on Cape Town's history I was reading. One chapter was about the dis...

 The City of Cape Town said it would introduce relief measures after protests against the proposed huge property rates and taxes increases in the 2025/2026 budget. These measures remain to be seen but it's unlikely to offset increases of over 20% for residents whose properties are valued over R3 million. The city has received 14,000 comments to the budget and has extended the period for comments. Below are my comments submitted: Comment on Cape Town's 2025/26 Budget DA opposes budget increases  In negotiations with the ANC-led coalition, the DA supported the 2% and then 0.5% VAT increases if it received concessions on other matters. But when these were not forthcoming, it turned 180 degrees and opposed the increases citing it was unaffordable to citizens and would worsen the poor economic conditions in the country.  Their main point, though, was Treasury could make savings in various departments by eliminating dysfunctional and unnecessary departments and wasteful expendi...