South Africa's unemployment rate rose to 32.9% in the first quarter of 2023 from 32.7% in the last quarter of 2022. One worrying trend is that 85,000 jobs were lost in private households, which would be domestic staff and gardeners. This suggests middle-class households are financially strained while others are immigrating.

Load shedding is job shedding; it's as simple as that. All the talk by ANC mandarins about confronting the terrible trifecta of unemployment, poverty and inequality is pie in the sky if Eskom can't provide reliable power.

Data unveiled on Tuesday by Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) showed the unemployment rate edged up to 32.9% in Q1 of this year compared with 32.7% in the last quarter of 2022 when the economy contracted by 1.3%.

While the number of employed persons rose by 258,000 to 16.2 million in the first three months of the year compared with the previous quarter, the unemployment rate still increased because of a flow from the "not economically active category".

"It was observed that a large number of persons moved from the 'not economically active' category to 'employed' and 'unemployed' statuses between the two quarters, which resulted in an increase of 0.2 of a percentage point in the unemployment rate to 32.9%," Stats SA said.

Considering the sheer scale of the power crisis which is shredding economic growth while simultaneously fuelling inflation because of the costs businesses incur to keep the lights on -- a classic case of what economists term stagflation -- one supposes...