South Africa’s official unemployment rate increased from 17.6 percent in 1996 to 30.4 percent in 2002, before declining to 22 percent in 2007. The legacy of apartheid has clearly resulted in a high level of unemployment, but growth since 1994 has not been as high as we would like. The rate at which an economy grows consistently is critical.
While we all recognise that jobs are not automatically created when countries grow, we do know that if a country is not growing then it is extremely difficult to create new jobs, or even sustain existing ones. Government has frequently mentioned the desire to grow the economy at 7 percent a year.