Why did almost a quarter of a million South Africans decide between March and June that this was a great time to start looking for a job?
Stats SA has no idea, and nor, it seems, does anyone else. But it was this that caused the unemployment rate to jump 1.4 percentage points in the second quarter, to a frightening 29%.
This is the largest quarterly jump since 2003. It's a sudden break from the 27% range in which the rate hovered for two years; and there aren't usually seasonal factors involved. Nor were there any changes to the method Stats SA uses to conduct its survey. "We don't have an explanation," says Stats SA acting director for labour statistics Malerato Mosiane.
Quibbling about the exact number might seem churlish when SA so clearly has such a massive unemployment problem. But when the magnitude of a statistical change is so unexpected, is it because people have changed their behaviour in ways we don't yet understand — or because there are anomalies in the numbers themselves?
Certainly there are good reasons why the unemployment rate is going up. SA is locked in one of its longest-ever economic downturns, with little hope of growth lifting above 1% any time soon. Many companies will have kept hoping business conditions would improve, especially given President Cyril Ramaphosa's promise of a "new dawn". But now, even those companies that had tried to avoid retrenchments may be giving up on an upturn.
The extreme weakness in the economy is evident in the range of sectors that shed jobs during the second quarter — which included even those, such as finance, that have generally created jobs despite the downturn.
Yet it wasn't job losses that drove up the unemployment rate this time. In fact, according to Stats SA, employment showed a net second-quarter increase — albeit of a paltry 21,000 jobs — for the first time in four years, with a big jump in informal-sector jobs countering the loss of formal-sector jobs.
Nor did trends change in the economically active population - about 600,000 new people enter the job market each year, and SA's problem is that it doesn't create nearly enough jobs to absorb them.
But what tends to flatter the official unemployment rate is that so many people simply give up looking for jobs, and so get counted out of the ranks of the unemployed by Stats SA. What shifted in the second quarter is that 248,000 of those "discouraged" workers counted themselves back into the workforce, swelling the ranks of the officially unemployed. Economists will be taking a close look at the data to try to work out who those workers are and what's going on.
One possibility is that May's general election and the campaign promises of growth and job creation have encouraged the long-term unemployed back into the labour market. That suggests that now, more than ever, the pressure is on to deliver on those jobs promises.
• Joffe is a communications consultant and freelance journalist
