South Africa’s cost-of-living squeeze

South Africa’s economic environment is bleak, especially for younger people trying to enter the job market. There is pressure from every direction.

As someone who reads the news daily, participates in the economy and must cover her own living costs, I feel it acutely.

My father has often said to me and my brother: “If you can leave the country for a better opportunity elsewhere, you should.”

This says a lot about a country that an increasing number no longer call home.

Municipal tariffs add to household strain

My home city, Centurion, falls within one of South Africa’s largest metropolitan municipalities, Tshwane. Tshwane reached only 20% of its 2024/25 electricity-grid and water-infrastructure targets. Yet, since 1 July, the City of Tshwane increased tariffs applied directly to consumption rates and basic service fees. Depending on property value and category, these increases will affect households differently, but they will affect everyone.

The average tariff increases are:

Inflation and unemployment deepen the squeeze

This is alarming, because, increasingly, only wealthier households and large companies are able to absorb these rates on top of rising food, fuel and service costs. The cliché that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer is becoming truer by the month. Caught in the middle is the middle class, which South Africa can ill afford to lose.

The numbers support this. Nationally, headline consumer inflation climbed to 4.5% in May 2026, its steepest rate since July 2024. The increase was driven mainly by transport costs, which rose 9.4% year on year, and housing and utilities, which rose 5.3%, the very categories into which municipal tariff hikes fall. Petrol prices have gone up 24.8% over the past year, while diesel prices are up 53. 8%. Even if food inflation were to ease, the cost of keeping the lights on, the taps running and the car on the road is rising faster than wages for many households.

Employment is the other half of the story. StatsSA’s Quarterly Labour Force Survey, released on 12 May, shows that South Africa’s official unemployment rate rose to 32,7% in the first quarter of 2026, up from 31,4% in quarter four of 2025. That means 8,1 million people are unemployed. Gauteng alone shed 67,000 jobs in the first quarter of this year, more than any other province. For young people – between 15 and 34 – the picture is worse; youth unemployment rose from 43.8% in the last quarter of 2025 to 45,8% in the first quarter this year. Young South Africans are not only more likely to be unemployed but also less likely to be in employment relative to their share of the working-age population.

Put plainly, municipal costs are rising faster than the economy is creating the jobs needed to pay for them. That is not a recipe for a stable middle class; it is a recipe for its erosion.

Why leaving starts to look attractive

In a strained economy, unemployment and crime become more prevalent and feed off each other. The two have a habit of travelling together, as I spelled out in a letter to the editor published in The Citizen earlier this year (“Money woes, crime walk together”, 25 May).

Rising unemployment doesn’t just squeeze household budgets. It feeds the very crime rate that drives so many South Africans to consider leaving in the first place.

SAPS recorded 6,351 murders nationally between October and December 2025, and 5,181 between January and March 2026, with a staggering 58 killings a day in the first quarter of the year. To this must be added more than 11,000 reported rapes, and thousands of house and business burglaries every quarter. High unemployment and high crime numbers are among the strongest push factors behind the decision to emigrate, a rational response to feeling both unsafe and unable to earn a living, rather than mere restlessness.

The real question, then, is not whether unemployment and crime are pushing people out, but what South Africa is doing to reduce the pressure enough to make staying the more rational choice.

Reality sets in when people do leave. Emigration is not simply a matter of packing a suitcase and embarking on a better life on the other side; it comes with costs, adjustments and inevitable disappointments. But even though emigrants realise that there are risks involved in leaving, the upside, including job opportunities and safer environments, is still greater than the penalties of staying in South Africa.

Everyone knows someone who is thinking about emigrating or who has already left. According to UN International Migrant Stock data, 1,005,800 people left the country between 1990 and 2024. The outflow has not slowed either: roughly 119,000 left between 2000 and 2005, and a further 107,500 left between 2020 and 2024.

Getting a better understanding of why people have emigrated is the overall goal of the Diaspora Survey launched by the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) as part of its #WhatSACanBe campaign. The objective, says IRR Strategic Engagements Manager Makone Maja, “is to turn South Africa into a country people want to come to – where airport goodbyes start sounding more like ‘welcome home’ and less like ‘we will miss you’”.

The fact that this research is necessary says something on its own. More than one million departures over three decades is not a footnote, but a referendum South Africans have been casting with their feet.

My father’s advice was never about leaving; it was a verdict on the costs of staying.

It is harder to ask what it would take, in readily available jobs, in lights that stay on and taps that keep running, to make staying feel like a choice worth making rather than a sacrifice worth escaping. But until South Africans and the government they elect can provide the answer, the queues at the airports will keep filling with people saying goodbye, for good.

[Image: by choreographhttps://app.envato.com/photos/7bd7e14d-5883-4eb1-8363-aee902ee41c6]

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