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South Africa’s first-quarter 2026 gross domestic product figures are due today, with market expectations centred on quarter-on-quarter growth of 0.2% and year-on-year expectations ranging from 0.3% to 0.8%.

While analysts may pore over the short-term meaning of the numbers, and whether it is good or bad, the real thinking needs to be done around the meaning of the much longer-term trendlines.

From a strategic perspective, whether the annual number lands nearer half a point or nearer one point is neither here nor there. Either number leaves South Africa in essentially the same position. It remains a country with a policy framework unable to materially address living standards, unemployment, and fiscal pressure.

To do that, economic growth must break firmly through 2.0% and move towards 3.0% and then 4.0%. That would begin to change the arithmetic of household income, job creation, public debt, and social stability. Anything below that does not materially change conditions on the ground.

Instead, the only thing to read in a number near 1.0% is that South Africa is governed without an economic reform strategy. That statement is easy to justify through the fixed investment rate. Gross fixed capital formation stood at 13.5% of GDP in the fourth quarter of 2025, down from near 16.0% in 2018, the year Cyril Ramaphosa became president, and far below the peak of 23.3% in the fourth quarter of 2008, let alone the 25.0% to 30.0% of South Africa’s emerging market peers.

What can be read into that, in turn, is that the requisite urgency and full suite of ideas to lift the growth rate are absent from both the Democratic Alliance (DA) and African National Congress (ANC) parts of the Government of National Unity (GNU). The ANC remains trapped in indecision and dated ideology. The DA is better in parts, but has not yet produced a national growth strategy that would, in practice, be able to shift the investment rate and rebuild productive capacity.

That is why over-reading the short-term meaning in today’s number must be resisted.

It is more useful to think in terms of what has occurred in the South African economy since the 1950s.

The chart below shows that the South African economy sustained growth of around 5.0% through the 1950s and 1960s as fixed investment rose and manufacturing’s share of GDP expanded.

The chart goes on to show that, from the 1970s, the country began to deindustrialise and continued to do so through the democratic transition. It has now reached a point where manufacturing’s share of GDP sits at a record low. It is also far below the level seen in many of South Africa’s peer economies.

The importance of that is not narrowly economic. Rather, a manufacturing economy is a necessary economic and social bridge between rural poverty and the urban middle class. It offers poor people the opportunity to come to a city, be housed, be employed among their peers, and gain from the broader circle of experience created by those who came before them. It allows families to move from insecurity to wages, from wages to assets, and from assets to middle-class prospects for their children.

For unskilled rural people living in poverty, there is no other equally straightforward route to get their children into the middle classes. Domestic work is a lonely existence without the social support structures offered by industrial work among scores of people in a factory. Mines are in the rural backwaters, as are massive industrial and power plants. Skilled services work is limited in the extent required to address mass national unemployment and also requires a level of skill that the poorest do not easily possess.

The implications are vast. Without going through such a phase, it becomes very difficult to address the unemployment problem, especially among people with limited education and few inherited advantages.

Today’s again modest GDP number must therefore be understood not just in terms of being so low, but in terms of being low in an economy that does not offer the necessary bridge for the rural poor to get their children into the middle classes. The political and social consequences that flow from the latter point are as important as the former.