Prof. Joseph Sekhampu, chief director of the NWU Business School

By Prof. Joseph Sekhampu, chief director of the NWU Business School.

In November, millions of young South Africans will perform one of the defining acts of democratic adulthood by choosing who governs the places in which they live. However, labour market figures released this week by Statistics South Africa reveal the economic reality against which this political adulthood will be exercised.

South Africa’s unemployment rate rose to 33.6% in the second quarter of 2026, leaving almost 8.5 million people unemployed. The position of younger South Africans is particularly stark. Among those aged 15 to 34, almost five million were unemployed, while 45.4%, or about 9.5 million young people in this age group, were neither in employment, education nor training.

Many will therefore enter the voting booth without the stable employment that makes independent living and the establishment of a household possible. South Africa is approaching another election with a peculiar divide: political adulthood arrives on schedule, while economic adulthood increasingly does not.

Unemployment figures are usually read as measures of economic performance. They tell us how many jobs the economy is failing to create and how much productive capacity is being wasted. For young South Africans, however, these figures also tell us something about time. For at least the past six years, Stats SA’s surveys have shown that more than four in every ten South Africans aged 15 to 34 have consistently been outside employment, education or training. For a substantial proportion of a generation, the transition from education to work and economic independence is becoming increasingly prolonged.

Adulthood is not simply an age or legal status. It is also an economic position built around the capacity to earn an income, establish an independent household and begin accumulating assets. When stable employment is postponed, these milestones are postponed with it. South Africa’s unemployment crisis may therefore be doing something more consequential than suppressing income: it may be changing when adulthood becomes economically possible.

Here, the idea of a life course offers a useful analytical lens. Economies do more than produce goods, services and tax revenue. They also provide the institutional pathways through which people move from dependence towards economic independence. Employment provides more than income: it allows individuals to establish households, obtain credit, accumulate assets and make longer-term decisions about family and where to live. When entry into employment is delayed for millions, these transitions become less predictable.

There are indications of this elsewhere in South Africa’s social data. Statistics South Africa recorded 102,373 marriages and unions in 2024, down from 143,279 in 2015, while the crude marriage rate fell from 2.6 to 1.6 per thousand people over the same period. None of this establishes that unemployment causes a decline in marriage or leads people to marry later. Marriage patterns also reflect changing preferences, cohabitation, gender relations and broader social change. The narrower point is that labour market insecurity forms part of the economic environment in which decisions about independent adulthood are made.

The distinction matters because unemployment is normally treated as a problem of income. Viewed through the life course, however, its effects accumulate over time. Someone entering stable employment at 22 follows a different trajectory from someone securing a first sustained job at 32. The difference encompasses not merely wages, but also experience, savings, pension contributions, credit history and asset accumulation. This becomes particularly consequential when almost eight in ten unemployed South Africans have been without work for a year or longer.

Delayed economic independence does not affect only the individual. Its costs are redistributed through households as parents support adult children for longer and income is pooled among employed and unemployed members. What is often described as household resilience therefore has a less comfortable interpretation. The family has become one of the institutions through which South Africa absorbs persistent unemployment, cushioning its effects while making prolonged exclusion from the labour market socially sustainable.

This prolonged dependence has a wider consequence. Political adulthood arrives at a legally defined age, but economic incorporation has no such timetable. A young person can possess the full rights and responsibilities of citizenship while remaining unable to secure the economic independence through which many of adulthood’s other choices become possible.
When South Africans in their twenties and early thirties enter the voting booth in November, they will exercise the full political agency of adulthood. Afterwards, many will return to family homes they cannot yet afford to leave, continue searching for work that has remained elusive and postpone decisions that once marked the ordinary progression of adult life. They will have chosen councillors, mayors and governments before some have had the opportunity to choose where they can afford to live or what kind of future they can realistically build.

Democracy has given them adulthood on time, but the economy has asked them to wait.