How low can you go?
Tuesday, July 27th, 2010
South Africa has the highest unemployment rate on the continent and experts say that nothing is expected to change before the end of the year in this regard. Reports said that some 25.3% of the working population are unemployed.
Of the 49 million people living in the rainbow nation, only 12.7 million have jobs. Economists say they fear that the strong local currency, the Rand (ZAR) is also not helping the national economy as exports have slowed down and redundancies have increase to curb corporate profit losses. At the same time consumer spending is at a low point.
This is bad news because 66% of all products made in south Africa are sold on the home market, reports said. At the same time corruption is also very high, causing public tenders to be awarded to politicians and they cronies instead of fairly distributing them to the private sector. Allegedly some 870,000 people lost their jobs in 2009 causing the nation to fall into a major depression, the worst in 17 years.
The presidency has lied that it wishes to curb unemployment from 25% to at least 14% by 2014. Police allegedly said that they fear that growing high unemployment and growing influx of immigrants may lead to a rise in criminal activities.
