If South Africa’s 12 million unemployed people stood in line, the queue would stretch from Johannesburg to Cairo.
This is the calculation by opposition politician Mmusi Maimane following the latest release of unemployment numbers by StatisticsSA. South Africa’s unemployment rate, among the highest in the world, rose to 33.2% in the second quarter of 2025, from 32.9% in the first quarter.
The expanded unemployment rate, which includes discouraged work seekers, improved marginally to 42.9% from 43.1% in the first quarter.
“There are now 12.6 million people without a job or who have given up all hope of finding a job,” Maimane’s organisation Build One South Africa (BOSA) said in a statement.
The jobless were categorised into three groups: 8.4 million formally unemployed, 3.4 million able to work but discouraged from looking for a job, and 800 000 available to work but have other reasons for not looking for a job.
“If every unemployed South African stood in a single file queue, it would stretch for almost 6300km, the distance from Johannesburg to Cairo, Egypt’s capital city,” BOSA said.
It said unemployment had risen steadily over the past 10 years, with 3.2 million more unemployed South Africans now than in 2015.
