Unemployed residents camped at Moore Road in Durban said on Tuesday that they are still without work, despite new figures showing fewer jobless people in the city.
eThekwini Municipality announced on Tuesday that its official unemployment rate fell from 27.8% to 22.2% in a year. The figures compare the third quarter of 2025 with the third quarter of 2026. They come from the Quarterly Labour Force Survey released by Statistics South Africa.
Felimntwini Gumede, who speaks for the group at Moore Road, said the protesters were there because they are unemployed. He said hiring should benefit local jobseekers who are already in Durban and looking for work, IOL reported.
Gumede said local unemployed residents have been waiting for jobs. He said they should be considered first when employers in the city are hiring.
The City said the number of unemployed residents dropped by 101,000, from 464,000 to 363,000. It said the number of employed residents grew by 66,000 to 1.27 million.
The metro also recorded an 18.2% rise in formal-sector employment. That added about 146,000 formal-sector jobs compared with a year earlier, the City said.
eThekwini was the only metro to record a year-on-year drop in unemployment. It now sits alongside Cape Town with the lowest unemployment rate among the metros. The national rate is 33.7%.
KwaZulu-Natal Premier Thamsanqa Ntuli welcomed the figures.
“These are encouraging figures for KwaZulu-Natal, particularly for the people of eThekwini,” Ntuli said. “We welcome the fact that Durban has recorded the largest annual decline in unemployment among the country’s metropolitan municipalities.”
Ntuli said the improvement came from work between the three spheres of government, organised business and investors. He linked the jobs figures to R124.5 billion in investment pledges made at the 2026 KwaZulu-Natal Investment Conference. The first target was R95 billion.
“We are determined to ensure that these commitments translate into actual projects, expanded businesses and employment opportunities for our people,” he said.
The premier also said the picture in the rest of the province is worse. The survey shows the KwaZulu-Natal unemployment rate rose from 32.5% in the second quarter to 33.3% in the third quarter of 2026.
About 2.73 million people in the province had jobs, while 1.36 million were unemployed. Outside the metro, unemployment in KwaZulu-Natal stood at 40.6%, according to the survey.
“We cannot celebrate the progress in eThekwini without acknowledging the millions of our people across KwaZulu-Natal who continue to struggle to find employment,” Ntuli said.
He said more work was needed in rural communities and smaller towns. He said the province must support agriculture, tourism and township businesses in those areas.
Ntuli called on the private sector to keep working with government to create jobs. He said the province aims to help create at least one million jobs by the end of its term in 2029.
Source: this article is based on reporting by IOL. Image: IOL. Written with the help of AI and published by the Tzaneen Voice News desk. See our Editorial Standards.
Kgomotso Maake covers news and politics for Tzaneen Voice. Kgomotso reports on government, Parliament, municipalities, courts, crime and service delivery across South Africa, with a close eye on how national decisions reach towns like Tzaneen and the wider Limpopo province. Stories are written in plain English and focus on the facts: who made the decision, what it means, and what happens next.