South Africa adds 44 000 jobs in Q4 2025 as unemployment dips slightly
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KWAZULU-NATAL has endured the Covid-19 pandemic, which shuttered businesses and severed supply chains. Then multiple destructive storms battered infrastructure and destroyed assets. At the same time, the civil unrest of July 2021 translated to a week of looting and violence that cost an estimated R50 billion, leaving factories in ashes and scaring away investors from the province. Each event alone would constitute a significant economic shock; together, they have created a compound crisis from which recovery remains elusive.
Statistics South Africa's official unemployment rate declined by 0.5% to 31.4% in Q4 of 2025, meaning that 44 000 jobs were added to the economy, and for a nation weary of any improvement, this is ostensibly welcome news. However, the number of discouraged job seekers rose by 233 000 to 3.7 million. These are individuals who have abandoned the search for work, who have aged out of hope. The expanded unemployment rate of 44.5% tells a more accurate story: nearly half of those who should be participating in the economy are excluded from it.
The national picture conceals a far more troubling reality unfolding. KZN has shed 41 000 positions, the only province to surpass Gauteng, which lost 54 000 positions. These are not abstract numbers. They represent families without income, communities without anchors, and a generation of young people staring into an abyss of exclusion. The expanded unemployment rate in KZN now stands at a staggering 47.1% – meaning nearly half of the province's potential workforce is effectively idle.
The national figures show modest gains in community and social services, the core sectors upon which KZN's economy depends – manufacturing and agriculture – continue to haemorrhage jobs. Nationally, manufacturing employment fell by 61 000 in the fourth quarter, while the trade sector lost 98 000 positions. These are the industries that have historically provided pathways into the formal economy for semi-skilled and low-skilled workers.
The crisis engulfing Tongaat Hulett, a 134-year-old sugar giant, an institution woven into the economic history of KZN's North Coast, now faces the very real prospect of permanent closure. The provisional liquidation application before the high court is not merely a corporate matter; it is a potential extinction event for entire communities from Maidstone to Amatikulu to Felixton.
About 2 600 direct employees would face immediate joblessness if the mills fell silent. However, the sugar industry supports an estimated 250 000 jobs nationwide, with the majority in KZN. More than 27 000 sugar cane growers – most of them small-scale black farmers who emerged from land reform programmes depend on Tongaat Hulett's milling infrastructure as their sole point of market access. Without operational mills, their crop becomes worthless, their livelihoods extinguished at a stroke. Transport operators, equipment suppliers, and local retailers would all be swept into the vortex. Entire rural economies would collapse, accelerating migration to already strained urban centres, and creating conditions ripe for social unrest.
The crisis at Tongaat Hulett demands intervention, not as a bailout of corporate interests but as a rescue of critical economic infrastructure. The government, through provincial leadership, must urgently facilitate a private sector-led solution that preserves milling capacity and maintains market access for thousands of small-scale growers. This is about protecting a value chain on which hundreds of thousands of livelihoods depend.
Second, we must accelerate the infrastructure-led growth agenda articulated in President Cyril Ramaphosa's recent State of the Nation Address. The construction sector gained 35 000 jobs in the final quarter of 2025, confirming that targeted infrastructure investment works. With over R1 trillion committed to public infrastructure over three years, the challenge now lies in execution: moving from announcement to implementation, from policy to procurement. KZN must secure its share of these investments, particularly in logistics, water infrastructure, and transport networks that underpin industrial competitiveness.
Third, KZN must leverage its existing strategic assets more aggressively. The Dube TradePort and Richards Bay special economic zones offer platforms for reindustrialisation, but they require reliable energy, efficient logistics, and regulatory certainty to attract investment. Reducing the cost of doing business is not an ideological slogan; it is a prerequisite for reversing the manufacturing job losses that are hollowing out the provincial economy.
Fourth, we must confront the youth unemployment crisis with far greater ambition. Nationally, youth unemployment stands at 43.8%. Among those aged 15 to 24, the rate exceeds 60%, and nearly six in 10 unemployed young people have never worked. This is a generational betrayal. The shift from passive social relief to active labour market programmes, linking support to training, apprenticeships and job-seeking, must be accelerated.
The R4 billion allocated to the Basic Education Employment Initiative, which has placed over 158 000 young people in schools, demonstrates what is possible when resources are aligned with intent. For KZN, a clear-eyed recognition that the provincial economy is at an inflexion point. The losses in manufacturing and trade, the sugar crisis, the accumulated trauma of pandemic, storm, and unrest – these are not challenges that will resolve themselves through the ordinary workings of the market. They require co-ordinated, sustained and intelligent intervention.
If we allow KZN's industrial base to continue its decline, if we permit the sugar industry to fail for want of decisive action, no amount of statistical optimism at the national level will suffice to mend the resulting social and economic tear. During the financial crisis, the US government stepped in to bail out large banks in the USA. The tagline was "they are too big to fail". The underlying message was that if the banks fail, then the economy and jobs are gone. In a similar vein, the national government may be urged to consider a bailout of Tongaat Huletts to save the KZN economy and employment.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.