Government published its latest poverty trends update in December 2025. This third edition of the country’s official standard of living profile conceals more than it reveals about the misery engulfing the landless, exploited and destitute millions.
Forty million people (out of an estimated mid-2025 figure of 63.1 million) survive without the necessities for a decent quality of life as the country moves into its fourth decade since 1994. These basic but grisly facts confirm, again, the hollowness of promises about a ‘better life for all in a post-apartheid South Africa’ that the black middle-class has been rehashing. Leaders who have been spinning this exhausted slogan whilst negotiating backdoor deals with the oppressors and imperialists have continued their self-enrichment schemes. Today, these elites shamelessly plunder more of the country’s wealth by any means possible, whereas the rest of society must battle hunger, homelessness, unemployment and countless hardships. This poverty trends report lays bare this terrifying freefall in living standards.
Counting the poor
The 2025 poverty status overview goes beyond detailing how many poor people there are in South Africa with snapshots of how unevenly this socioeconomic misery is distributed provincially. Instead of bombarding readers with dry and mindless data crunching results, typical of mystifiers of poverty statistics and apologists for capitalism’s violence against humanity, the spotlight here is on issues that are deeply political.
Counting the poor is determined by where experts peg the poverty line, which is a ‘cost-of-living yardstick’ used to separate the poor from the non-poor. What standard of living can an individual afford at R1,300 or R2,635 per month, known as lower and upper poverty-lines, is carefully examined throughout the report. When this cost-of-living benchmark drops from R2,635 to R1,300, then the number of poor people falls from 40 million to 23 million individuals. Unsurprisingly, as the cost-of-living soars, making ends meet is increasingly difficult for more people. It forces growing numbers of people below the poverty line.
The report shows that any attempt to eliminate poverty by picking a lower cost-of-living gauge is unrealistic, absurd and ridiculous. Such trickery makes poverty calculation a joke and pointless. After all, capitalism without a cost-of-living burden does not exist.
Government has been repeating its intent to ‘eliminate extreme poverty’ for decades, yet tens of millions of people are mired in poverty and plummeting deeper into it. The 2012 National Development Plan (NDP) set 2030 as a deadline when this zero-poverty target ought to be reached. The latest evidence confirms that government is bound to fall far short of its minimalist anti-poverty goals, let alone eliminate widespread impoverishment by 2030. Contrary to government claims, the state has lost its so-called war on poverty mainly due to its incompetence, obsolete politics, misguided economic policies and corruption. It is but another example of the mounting dilemmas of a state that represent and protects the enemies of the poor.
Self-organise against mounting mass poverty
Finding sound explanations for the endurance of mass poverty in this report is like searching for a needle in a haystack. This struggle to explain why poverty endures is a weakness that overshadows the report’s technical strength.
The report (pp32-42) in effect blames persisting poverty on the ‘lingering effects’ of periodic economic crises. It concedes that poor people have continued to suffer the burden of the 2007-2009 recession that intersected with the food price inflation crisis. Officially, the world has moved on from this crisis but without the poor recovering from this catastrophic recession. The Covid-19 pandemic aggravated this suffering. At the peak of the pandemic, food prices rapidly increased and obstructed poor people from finding enough to eat daily.
Repeating that Covid-19 and the great global recession (2007-2009) added to poverty through unemployment, just states the obvious rather than marking a breakthrough discovery in neoliberal thinking. Being thrown into poverty is inevitable for a worker without a job and a guaranteed income for a high quality of life. In every economic crisis the minority controlling economic and political power imposes the cost of the economic meltdown on the backs of the labouring majority. One way they do this is by firing workers on a mass scale, thus adding to the expanding jobless reservoir and pushing their standard of living into a vicious downward spiral.
Even though growing numbers of wage workers survive below the poverty line (called working poverty), these workers are largely invisible in this report. All wage workers are caught in this race to the bottom; not just the unemployed. Working poverty is the norm rather than the exception as wages fail to keep pace with the cost of living. Having a job does not guarantee any worker a living wage. Exploiters always aim to extract maximum profits from workers through relentless attacks on wages, rarely concerning themselves with poverty lines or minimum wage laws.
The 2025 poverty trends report shows the harshness of the cost-of-living crisis. It partly unmasks the difficulties working people must battle in making ends meet. Clearly, all workers, the employed and unemployed united, stand to gain from organised resistance against this assault on a socially progressive standard of living. Mobilisation of this resistance movement is as urgent as strong self-organisation under the direct control of working people. Forging a political united front – that links our demands of the right to work and living wages that fully compensate for cost-of-living inflation with a new way of organizing society on democratic ecosocialist principles – is paramount.