This opinion piece explains the truth behind responses to Fourie’s critique regarding South Africa’s jobless rate. Thus, this piece is a direct rebuttal to the former Statistician General, Pali Lehohla, who penned an article ‘Debating the labour force survey – a response to Fourie’s critique’ on IOL on 17 June 2025. Lehohla claims that I, through my article ‘Why Capitec’s CEO is forcing SA to rethink its unemployment narrative’ (Business Day, 14 June and City Press, 15 June), have ‘amplified the debate’, leading him to ‘shed light on this before it goes out of hand based on misinformation and speculation.’
To begin with, my article did not dismiss StatsSA data outright. I argued that South Africa’s high unemployment figures reflect a biopolitical statistical system that invisibly erases the informal economy and Black labour. I also contended that this is due to restrictive measurement methodologies and the active suppression of the informal sector, unlike in other developing countries. As a recommendation, I called for new hybrid metrics and structural reforms to accurately recognise and support this vital, yet uncounted, economic activity. This overlaps with a fairer response by UCT’s Haroon Bhorat, who appears to engage rather than dismiss Fourie’s assertions as hogwash.
On the other hand, Lehohla dismisses Fourie’s 10% estimate, based on informal economic activity, as ‘abracadabra’, ‘lying’, and the rant of a ‘random businessman who profits from Black communities’. His anger masks a much more serious crisis: South Africa’s economic measurement system, however methodologically sound, is philosophically unequipped to capture the informal, digital and survivalist realities of its majority-Black workforce.
Lehohla defends StatsSA’s unemployment figures through adherence to ILO standards and the QLFS’s meticulous design. However, I maintain that this rigour obscures vast economic activity: a township hairdresser or vendor, lacking formal records, becomes statistically invisible. This contributes to a profound ethical challenge: a significant disparity between different racial groups, with Blacks as an idling class facing a 40% expanded unemployment rate versus 7% for whites. South Africa’s high unemployment also stands as a global anomaly compared to countries like Mexico (55% informal, 4.5% unemployment) and Nigeria (85% informal, 3.34% unemployment), which include self-reported informal work in their statistics. Ultimately, these unemployment metrics are biopolitical instruments, perpetuating apartheid’s legacy by rendering Black economic agency statistically non-existent.
Bhorat claims that the UCT Development Policy Research Unit (DPRU) data consistently shows that South Africa “has one of the highest unemployment rates in the world, at 33.6%, but also one of the lowest rates of informality at about 16.3%.” He also notes that most emerging markets address unemployment not by creating vastly more formal wage jobs than we do, but by allowing many people to work freely in the informal economy. Additionally, Bhorat says ongoing research at DPRU confirms this: South Africa’s unusually high unemployment is not primarily due to factors such as poor job growth or strict labour laws. Instead, he opines, it is because our economy appears to be set up to actively hinder the informal sector from thriving. My word of advice is that DPRU must also not avoid confronting the moral failures or societal consequences that their statistics might obscure.
Lehohla’s red corner, which refuses to engage, illustrates the difficulty of escaping the heavy clutches of orthodox economics and its failures, viewing the economy (and by implication, social life) as a predictable machine operating in equilibrium. When official statistics feel alien to lived experience, the social contract built on citizens sharing data erodes, revealing a profound crisis in economics. Unlike Adam Smith, who grounded market value in social relations and ethics in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, modern economics has severed this moral root, prioritising abstract mathematical models.
Among many individuals, Mark Blaug and Ben Fine critique modern economics, particularly its ‘formalist revolution’ that emerged post-1945, which shifted the discipline towards an overwhelming, yet often superficial, reliance on mathematics and statistics. Fine argues that this watershed moment paradoxically narrowed economics’ internal scope and detached it from other social sciences, only for its “neoclassical orthodoxy” to later aggressively “colonise” other fields through what he terms “economics imperialism.”
Simplically stated, both Blaug and Fine contend that this pursuit of mathematical formalism has resulted in a discipline that is not truly rigorous, often ignoring its limitations and prioritising abstract technical apparatus, like utility and production functions, to the point of reducing complex human behaviour to “utility functions”. Unfortunately, this has led to a problematic expansion of economic rationality into diverse areas, despite its initial confinement. This is exemplified by the former Statistician-General’s defence of outdated methodologies that confine dynamic 21st-century informality within rigid 20th-century statistical boxes.
Joseph Stiglitz’s warning about GDP-centric metrics obscuring true well-being resonates deeply: persistent high youth unemployment amidst trillions of Rands in rural and township transactions is not just an error, but an epistemological violence resulting from an inadequate measurement paradigm. Kenneth Boulding contends that modern economics builds upon but cannot replace Adam Smith or Karl Marx, as classical works like The Wealth of Nations and Das Kapital contain unrealised “evolutionary potential” that is absent in contemporary models. He warns that graduate education, excluding economic history, produces mere ‘idiots savant’, as Blaug calls them. These individuals are technically adept but devoid of institutional understanding and historical perspective. Boulding argues that the solution integrates both: modern rigour stands “on the shoulders of giants,” such as our esteemed brother Lehohla and others, while classical wisdom ensures that economics remains a profound social science.
This is unlikely to happen anytime soon because the anti-historical approach dominates modern economics education, prioritising technical rigour (econometrics, modelling) while dismissing classical texts as obsolete. This cultivates “slick technicians” (Boulding), who are adept at data manipulation but blind to institutional realities and unquantifiable social dimensions, echoing Blaug’s warning of idiots savant. Conversely, overly historical methods excessively contextualise legacy but fixate on ‘errors’ in classical works, reducing economics to ‘a monumental collection of errors’. A balanced synthesis of approaches bridges this divide by integrating analytical advances with traditional social discourses, thereby fostering critical engagement with economics as both a technical and humanistic discipline, despite curricular challenges.
Lehohla’s defence rests on a rigid positivism—the “holy” authority of statistical processes—yet this glosses over the ethical roots of economic thought. For Smith, wealth lay in the capacity to “command the labour of others,” signalling a social relationship, not a detached data point. In contrast, modern economic practice has decoupled itself from these normative foundations. As Stiglitz argues, most metrics conceal inequality, ecological breakdown and human suffering, reducing development to arithmetic rather than justice. This philosophical drift is evident in South Africa: while Stats SA’s unemployment data climbs, Capitec reports over R2 trillion in township transactions—a lived economic vibrancy invisible to official instruments.
This disconnect signals an even more serious crisis within the discipline of economics. In this paradigm, equilibrium models and optimisation problems eclipse historical nuance, cultural dynamics, and power relations. Boulding warned of this technocratic drift, describing modern economists (idiots savant), who are technicians fluent in calculus yet blind to social texture. Lehohla’s intolerance to other perspectives and anger at Fourie’s informal ‘10% unemployment’ claim are telling. While perhaps statistically imprecise, the claim gestures toward a critical insight: current labour metrics are ill-equipped to register the hybrid, precarious, and informal economic activities that characterise the post-industrial, post-colonial economies of the Global South.
In brief, Lehohla’s indignation underscores the limitations of the method when it is detached from its context. The rift between official statistics and grassroots economic life is not merely technical but philosophical. Treating data as sacrosanct and context as peripheral, the economics-statistics discipline risks irrelevance. As long as our tools remain blind to the evolving ways people work, trade and survive, the debate between Lehohla and Fourie will continue to speak past the realities on the ground.
In a direct address to me, Lehohla states, “There is no legacy to protect on my part, Bhungane (my totem), nor language to polish. When a lie is told, there is no reason to give it a different word.” He adds, “It is simply a ‘lie,’ and when an argument does not make sense, it is called nonsense in the English language, and when nonsense is given wheels and wings to fly, it is called ‘rubbish.’” Furthermore, he asserts that “those who wish to opine should do so from research rather than from a hailer.”
While I may not employ his over-the-top, salacious language, as my older sibling Lehohla does, I am neither a pedestrian nor an imbecile who is illiterate and unaware of what I am talking about. I have my own academic and public policy track record, which makes me far more than just “a hailer.” As others have rightly pointed out, shouting or using unpolished language does not make one’s point more persuasive. Instead, we need to allow a multiplicity of viewpoints to ensure everyone is visible and accounted for in efforts to tackle poverty, inequality, land reform, and unemployment.
Finally, Lehohla points out that two key factors explain South Africa’s unique and outlier unemployment figures: the significant role of agricultural activity tied to land ownership and high levels of economic concentration. He further argues that these factors directly challenge simplistic international comparisons as the land question, far from being a political figment, is central to South Africa’s distinct employment landscape. Lehohla also opines that the country’s Land Act has systematically impoverished skills, practice, participation and empowerment, making it unsurprising that its unemployment mirrors its outlier status in land ownership, demanding full parliamentary engagement if South Africa’s unemployment is ever to align with that of comparable countries. According to him, Fourie’s provocation, if anything, underscores the critical importance of the land question, and all other speculative arguments are irrelevant to this debate.
No. Lehohla is deliberately and disingenuously conflating issues to hide the fact that his revered unemployment metrics miss the ethical forest for the numerical trees.
Si ya yibanga le economy!
