Between 1994 and 2008, job creation became the most tangible dividend of democracy. The economy added more than seven million positions, lifting total employment from roughly eight million to above 15 million - an average of about 500 000 net new jobs every year under Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki. The reason was that economic growth averaged more than 4% through the 2000s, business confidence crested above 80 points, and fixed investment climbed to over 21% of GDP.

It was a simple, virtuous loop. Policy attracted investment, investment built new enterprise, and firms hired at scale. For every basis point added to growth, the country reaped thousands of new livelihoods.

This period was defined by chiefly pragmatic macro-economic management. Inflation targeting stabilised prices, fiscal discipline halved the debt ratio, and trade liberalisation drew South Africa into global value chains. The private sector flourished alongside public-works expansion, while millions gained first-time access to electricity, credit, and housing. The share of adults in work, the labour-absorption rate, rose steadily, and for the first time since the 1970s job creation outpaced population growth. It was the closest the country has ever come to inclusive prosperity.

Then the gears ground. Two events set the new direction. The first was Polokwane, the ANC’s 2007 national conference at which Mbeki was unseated and Jacob Zuma’s faction triumphed. Polokwane did not only change a leader, it overturned the internal balance of power within the ruling alliance. The ideological left, long suspicious of market reform, re-entered the centre of decision-making, allowing a looting elite to seize control of the state’s commanding heights.

In practice this meant ideology over investment, harsher racial edicts, a rewritten mining charter, threats to property rights, the cancellation of bilateral investment treaties, and the first moves toward a state-run health monopoly. The fiscal conservatism of the Mbeki years gave way to patronage and populism. Policy coherence dissolved into a rolling contest between factions, and private risk capital stepped back.

The second blow came almost simultaneously with the global financial crisis of 2008. Nations with clear, investor-friendly rules quickly recovered their stride but South Africa did not. Under Zuma the economy averaged growth of under 2%, and job creation rates halved to around 250 000 net new positions a year. Fixed investment slid toward 17% of GDP, business confidence sank below the neutral 50-point line, and the state ballooned. Public-sector employment replaced private enterprise, and spending on wages outgrew spending on infrastructure.

By the time Cyril Ramaphosa took office in 2018, the jobs engine was already misfiring. Yet since he took command the performance has been even worse. Average job creation has fallen below 100 000 a year. Unemployment remains stuck well above 30%. The absorption rate has flatlined near 40%, its lowest level since the democratic transition, and youth unemployment remains above 60%.

Where policy certainty, fiscal prudence, and market openness once produced half a million jobs a year, today policy volatility, ideological rigidity, and regulatory excess deliver a fraction of that. The tragedy of the post-Polokwane era is not that South Africa forgot how to create jobs, it is that it stopped trusting the conditions that once allowed them to be created.

Pierneef is an occasional columnist which aims to sketch the broad vistas of South Africa's domestic landscape.