As published by Siyabonga Hadebe in the African Times
Economists and analysts habitually compare presidential GDP records: Nelson Mandela (2.7%), Thabo Mbeki (4.2%), Jacob Zuma (1.7%) and Cyril Ramaphosa (0.6%). This spectacle reduces complex national journeys to a neoliberal scorecard, obscuring the ongoing structural effects of apartheid behind sporadic growth spurts.
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As Joseph Stiglitz aptly notes, GDP measures “everything except that which makes life worthwhile.” South Africa proves this: under Mbeki’s so-called boom, inequality deepened and unemployment barely moved. By 2025, poverty affected 63% of the population, overall unemployment stood at 31.9%, and youth joblessness reached a staggering 59.6%.
This ‘economic boom’, for example, is untruthfully cited as a period of national prosperity. While GDP figures increased, this was essentially a phenomenon of ‘jobless growth,’ a term used to describe a time when an expanding economy failed to generate meaningful employment for the masses.
Even if jobs were created, that would not change the issues we are highlighting in this op-ed. An apartheid economy is centred on the oppressed people’s lives under global capitalism at their expense, and that is a fundamental reality that mere job creation within the same system cannot change.
Neoliberal thought promotes the idea that free markets and private enterprise, not government action, are the primary drivers of economic growth. This is a central hypocrisy of the neoliberal agenda: it holds presidents responsible for economic growth while simultaneously arguing that the state should not intervene in the economy.
This ‘hands-off’ approach, promoted by institutions like the IMF and World Bank, asserts that free markets and export-led growth are the only viable path. However, when poverty persists, leaders, not policies, are blamed.
Neoliberalism deflects criticism and maintains dominance despite glaring failures; the ANC must bear all the blame instead.
The Trickle-Down Delusion and Its Colonial Roots Post-1994
Under pressure from world powers, South Africa embraced export-led growth, privatisation and financialisation as cure-alls. The promise? Global integration would uplift the masses. The reality? Racialised inequality hardened. Under Mbeki, growth averaged 4.2%, but the Gini coefficient worsened and continues to decline.
As Naomi Klein argues in The Shock Doctrine, neoliberalism thrives on crisis, using ‘reforms’ to entrench elite control. South Africa’s transition became a case study: Black Economic Empowerment created billionaires, not broad-based prosperity. A narrow stratum of black elites became what Samir Amin called a comprador bourgeoisie, a class acting as a transmission belt for global capital. Rather than dismantling the apartheid economy, they became its local custodians who engineered the death of 34 striking miners in Marikana.
The economy’s core, including mining, finance and agribusiness, retained its colonial extractive logic. As Wits academic Roger Southall notes, the post-apartheid elite became caretakers of capital, not architects of transformation. Thus, the structure of the South African economy remains essentially unchanged from the apartheid era.
Control over major industries is still concentrated in a few hands, while the majority of black South Africans remain excluded from meaningful participation. As the late Sampie Terreblanche documented in A History of Inequality in South Africa 1652-2002, wealth accumulation since 1994 reflects continuity, not rupture. The myth of a ‘better-performing’ economy is irrelevant if it fails the black majority.
The hypocrisy of neoliberalism is also most evident in its schizophrenic approach to the labour market. It demands job creation while simultaneously shackling states with policies of austerity and deregulation.
For example, Mbeki’s period of growth was driven by capital-intensive sectors and speculative inflows, not mass employment. As manufacturing declined, the finance and insurance sectors expanded, generating profits without creating jobs, while the agricultural sector further contracted due to underinvestment. The World Bank itself notes that manufacturing drives structural transformation, yet South Africa’s deindustrialisation accelerated.
Dani Rodrik emphasises that industrial policy is crucial for employment-rich growth. South Africa ignored this, embracing services and finance instead. The result? ‘Jobless growth’ became permanent, with unions and communities blamed for resisting ‘flexibility.’ GDP is a misleading metric; it fails to account for crucial factors like environmental harm, inequality, and social well-being.
In South Africa, this is tragically exemplified: while GDP has fluctuated, the living standards for the majority have declined. The GDP illusion, therefore, conceals a deeper reality of poverty, landlessness, and unemployment. As Thomas Piketty notes, rising GDP can coexist with growing inequality, a paradox that South Africa embodies tragically.
International financial institutions present themselves as neutral actors. In practice, they reinforce colonial patterns of dependency. The World Bank’s USD 1 billion loan to South Africa in 2023, for instance, mandated the unbundling of Eskom, prioritising private renewable energy providers over public energy access. Similarly, the United States has threatened South Africa’s AGOA status in response to proposed regulations on private security firms. In this way, ‘free trade’ becomes a coercive tool.
International financial institutions demand fiscal discipline that guts social spending, even as they preach ‘inclusive growth.’ The 2025 budget allocated R259.3 billion for social grants, which is a lifeline for the poor, but it has been labelled a “fiscal risk.” As Rodrik and Stiglitz argue, global governance is rigged in favour of powerful nations. It cloaks structural violence in the language of liberal reform.
Neoliberalism functions as ideological camouflage, blaming states for unemployment while absolving markets. As David Harvey reveals, this “genius” lies in its ability to deflect anger away from capital’s structural violence. The idea of “full employment” is now a relic—global capital depends on surplus labour to suppress wages.
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In South Africa, this reality is entrenched through spatial apartheid: townships remain disconnected from economic centres, and former homelands endure unemployment rates as high as 100%.
The Black petit bourgeoisie, or nouveau riche, now embedded within the system, have abandoned redistributive agendas in favour of placing “Black faces in high places” to manage the interests of white capital. Frantz Fanon’s warning has materialised: liberation leaders have become “managers of European economies.”
Beyond Growth: Pathways to Democratic Economics
Escaping South Africa’s economic trap requires dismantling the neoliberal god of GDP and embracing a democratic economics rooted in redistribution, dignity, and collective well-being. GDP fetishism obscures the persistence of mass unemployment, deepening inequality, and environmental collapse. It counts luxury car sales but not unpaid care work, mine exports but not poisoned rivers. A new political economy must begin by redefining what counts—and for whom.
Community wealth building, land sovereignty, and new economic metrics must anchor democratic transformation. Municipal control of services like energy and water can shield communities from austerity, while cooperatives in agro-processing, housing, and renewables restore productive agency.
Redistribution must go beyond ownership to reshape production. And we must measure success through care, equality, and ecological regeneration—not GDP growth that rewards exclusion and capital accumulation. Industrial policy must be reclaimed as a democratic tool, with strategic public investment directed toward sectors with high employment multipliers, such as public transport, health care and education.
Ha-Joon Chang reminds us that no rich country developed through free-market orthodoxy; they used tariffs, subsidies, and planning. Financialisation, by contrast, fuels speculative bubbles. As Mariana Mazzucato argues, the state must actively shape markets—not simply fix their failures.
Yet even new global formations like BRICS must be scrutinised. China and Russia, presented as civilised alternatives to Western imperialism, replicate extractive logics across Africa. They invest in minerals, not manufacturing; in infrastructure for export, not for redistribution. Today’s ‘civilised forces’ may repackage old dependencies in a new language.
Conclusion: From Virtual Democracy to Economic Sovereignty
The current economic order has produced a profound disconnection between the ruling party and the people. The post-1994 dispensation resembles what Achille Mbembe terms a virtual democracy—elections exist, but absolute power resides elsewhere.
Liberation was promised, but technocracy and capital triumphed. Former liberation leaders, now beneficiaries of elite accumulation, have little incentive to transform a system they profit from. From both a Marxist and decolonial standpoint, neoliberalism functions as an ideological cover. It markets itself as efficiency and freedom, while entrenching elite control and resisting redistribution. GDP becomes the smiling mask for exploitation.
States are told they do not create jobs and that markets do. Yet when unemployment rises, it is the state, not the market, that is blamed. This contradiction is the cornerstone of neoliberal power.
The notion of “full employment” itself is a relic under financialised capitalism. It presumes the existence of labour markets capable of absorbing all willing workers. In reality, global capital needs surplus labour to discipline wages. As already stated, neoliberalism’s genius lies in blaming the state for crises it structurally cannot solve. The real question is not whether presidents can create jobs, but whether the economic model permits them to do so.
South Africa’s liberation promised shared prosperity, not a GDP beauty contest. In reality, people demand that economic models serve social justice, not the reverse. But the ANC’s pact with neoliberal orthodoxy has sidelined that vision, swapping revolutionary change for “black faces in high places” presiding over a still-colonial economy.
Redistribution has stalled, land remains concentrated, and wealth is flowing upward, leaving millions in the same state as they were in 1958.
Reclaiming economics means centring the landless, unemployed and working poor—not foreign investors or presidential speeches at Davos. The new economy will not be designed in World Bank boardrooms but will be imagined and fought for in community assemblies and the fertile soil of reclaimed farms. As the Marikana miners showed, when the economy fails the many, the people will rise—with or without permission.
This article has been published in partnership with the African Times.
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