eThekwini City Manager Musa Mbhele has emphasised the need to strengthen municipal infrastructure, improve service delivery and create an enabling environment for investment to sustain the city’s positive employment growth.
Mbhele’s remarks follow the release of Statistics South Africa’s Quarterly Labour Force Survey for the third quarter of 2026, which shows that eThekwini was the only metropolitan municipality in the country to record a decline in its unemployment rate over the year.
The survey, covering the period July to September 2026, shows that the city’s official unemployment rate dropped from 27.8% in the third quarter of 2025 to 22.2% in the corresponding period this year, representing a decrease of 5.6 percentage points.
This places eThekwini level with the City of Cape Town as the metropolitan municipalities with the lowest unemployment rate in the country, and significantly below the national rate of 33.7%.
Commenting on the figures, Mbhele said the improved employment performance is encouraging, but the municipality remained focused on the structural interventions needed to sustain long-term economic growth.
“These figures reflect an encouraging expansion in employment, indicating that more of our residents are engaged in productive work compared to a year ago – a welcome development for households across the municipality. It is particularly noteworthy that eThekwini has bucked the broader national trend during a period of rising unemployment in other regions,” Mbhele said.
Between the third quarter of 2025 and the third quarter of 2026, the number of unemployed residents in eThekwini decreased by 101 000, from 464 000 to 363 000.
Over the same period, the number of employed residents increased by 66 000 to 1.27 million, the largest employment gain recorded by any metropolitan municipality.
Formal sector employment in the city also increased by 146 000, representing growth of 18.2%.
Mbhele said the municipality’s economic mandate is to establish a predictable and enabling environment that builds investor confidence and supports enterprise development.
“Our primary responsibility as an administration is execution excellence: securing robust infrastructure for water and electricity, maintaining clean and safe public amenities, and streamlining regulatory processes to facilitate investment in Durban.
“Our strategic focus remains firmly fixed on these fundamentals, driven by collaborative partnerships with business, organised labour and all spheres of government,” he said.
The full Quarterly Labour Force Survey, Quarter 3: 2026, is available on the Statistics South Africa website at www.statssa.gov.za – SAnews.gov.za
Source: Original report at SAnews.gov.za.
