What An Arbitrary Line in the Karoo Says About South Africa and its Potential Futures

Provincial borders (like all borders) are arbitrary lines drawn on a map. But the arbitrary line that runs between the Eastern Cape and the Western Cape exposes a brutal lesson in what governance means in real life. On one side, in the rural Eastern Cape, unemployment sits at 49.4%. On the other, in the rural Western Cape, it is 15.9%. Two neighbouring regions, one border, and a labour market outcome that is worlds apart.

South Africa’s national unemployment rate is already punishing at 31.9% (the global rate is closer to 5%), but the national average hides the country’s real fracture lines. In the Eastern Cape overall unemployment is 41.2%, already higher than the national average. But strip the Eastern Cape’s two metros, Nelson Mandela Bay (Gqeberha, formerly Port Elizabeth) and Buffalo City (East London), out of the provincial picture, and the rural economy collapses into something close to a permanent jobs depression, with an unemployment rate of nearly 50%. The rural Eastern Cape figure represents about 750 000 adults who do not have the opportunity to earn an income to support themselves and their families.

What makes the contrast sharper is how quickly the numbers improve when you cross into the cities. Nelson Mandela Bay’s unemployment rate is 27.1% and Buffalo City’s is 27.7%. In plain terms, moving from the rural Eastern Cape to an Eastern Cape metro roughly halves your risk of unemployment, although even then the rate of joblessness is still five times the global average.

Then you step across the border into the Western Cape and the picture changes again. Cape Town’s unemployment rate is 19.7%, with the rural Western Cape lower still at 15.9%. The numbers in the Western Cape and Cape Town are despite the province having to take in a vast influx of economic migrants from the Eastern Cape. Research suggests that the Eastern Cape saw out-migration of nearly 500 000 people over the past five years and that more than half of migrants arriving in the Western Cape come from the Eastern Cape.

That gap in unemployment between the Eastern Cape and Western Cape is not a mystery of geography or culture. It tracks a long divergence in how these places have been run, how money is spent, how institutions function, and whether basic services and local administration make it easier or harder for firms to hire and expand.

Such extreme unemployment has consequences far beyond individual hardship. Economies grow when people earn and spend. When nearly half the adult population is excluded from work, money stops circulating, firms stop expanding, and growth stalls. That is what the line on the map is really showing. Not fate, but administration.

The reason for this divergence is not difficult to determine. Cape Town has not had an African National Congress (ANC) administration since 2006, and the Western Cape has not been governed by the party since 2009. Elsewhere, even in places where it has had spells on the opposition benches, such as Gauteng’s metros, the ANC is in control.

And yet, in the rural Eastern Cape, where almost one in two adults is unemployed, the ANC won over 70% of the vote in the 2024 election.