Still waiting for a comeback: SA's GDP growth since 1994
South Africa reported its best economic growth in three years in 2025, but 1.1% is not nearly good enough. It falls short of the National Treasury's predictions of 1.4%. It also lags well behind the IMF's global estimate of 3.3% and Nigeria's 4.2%.
GDP, the total value of goods and services produced, is a measure of economic health. When it grows, jobs are created and investment follows. When it contracts, jobs are lost and investors look elsewhere.
Between 1994 and 2007, South Africa averaged 3.6% growth thanks to a commodities boom, an expanding middle-class and a surplus budget in 2007/08. But loadshedding, the 2008 global recession, and state capture dragged the 2008–2019 average down to 1.6%. Post-Covid recovery has yet to restore those early highs.
2025 was South Africa's Government of National Unity's first full year since the 2024 national election. The coalition of rival political parties has a target of 3.5% growth by 2030. Economist Sanisha Packirisamy explained that several structural reforms could push economic growth toward 2% in the coming years. These include shifting electricity generation from Eskom to private sector players, adding renewables to the grid, expanding the transmission network, bringing private sector operators into Transnet's railways and Durban's Pier 2 terminal, ringfencing water revenue so that it is directed toward infrastructure, making it easier for tourist operators from China and India to enter South Africa, streamlining work visa approvals, digitising the economy, and overhauling municipal governance.
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