‘Too many people, too little money’: SA’s economy won’t sustain growing population

South Africa’s official population now stands at 60.6 million people, but experts warn the economy is not growing fast enough to sustain the country’s population growth.

This could mean the country might, as a nation, be getting poorer.

The census figure was made public on Thursday in the latest report by Statistics SA (Stat SA).

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Dawie Roodt, chief economist at the Efficient Group, said there could have been an undercount and there might be more people in the country – many of them illegal immigrants from the rest of Africa.

Stats SA demography and population chief director Diego Iturralde said at the end of June, South Africa had less than four million foreign nationals. The report shows an increase of 640 074 people since the middle of 2021, with more than half – about 34.8 million – living in Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape.

Roodt said the population growth was 1.5% to 1.6% a year, but the economy could not grow faster than 2%.

“The underlying growth for the economy is 2% or less,” he said. “It is very clear, on a capital basis, we will not get richer.”

Roodt said it was important to look at the demographic distribution of population, which had many young people – a good thing provided the country could capitalise on that.

“Unfortunately, our young people are not really trained, which means we cannot capitalise on that. [It] is a population dividend which could be either good or horribly bad,” Roodt said.

Dr Azar Jammine, Econometrix chief economist, said economic growth was expected to be between 2% and 2.5% but the population was already more than 1% bigger than last year.

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“Even if the economy grows by 2% and the population grows by more than 1%, on average, people’s living standards will have hardly grown at all,” he said.

Gauteng is the most populous province, with about 16.1 million people and an expected inflow of migrants of about 1.5 million.

Iturralde said the report was an output of a demographic model which was inclusive of data sources collected in the past, where nationality was gathered, and on that basis, the growth or shrinkage of the number of foreign nationals was calculated.

“We do not collect data on their migratory status. So whether they are documented or undocumented, refugees or asylum seekers, have a permit or not, we do not collect that,” he said.

“The report does not differentiate, but simply makes an estimation of the size of the foreign population which is resident in SA.”

Statistician-general Risenga Maluleke, who released the mid-year population estimates, said SA had sustained a positive growth rate despite the large number of deaths during the Covid pandemic.

“As the nation grappled with the pandemic, it brought attention not only to the importance of healthcare and other social services required by people, but also to the age profile of the population and the vulnerability of key populations in the country,” he said.

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