Christo van der Rheede, Executive Director at the FW de Klerk Foundation was invited by the Remgro Foundation to speak at their annual leadership conference. His topic focused on education, the key to a better future.

“Strong economies are built on strong educational foundations”. Education is not merely a social service, but the primary engine of economic growth, innovation, and shared prosperity in South Africa and across human history.

Every society faces a choice between two trajectories. When we invest in quality education, relevant skills, and innovation, we unlock a path to economic growth and shared prosperity. Conversely, under-resourced systems and educational decline lead straight to unemployment, social unrest, and lost potential.

To understand where we are, we must look at how humanity evolved from survival economies to global, connected knowledge societies. Crucially, human progress has always mirrored the evolution of education. From oral storytelling around campfires to written records, classical schools, industrial training, and today’s digital and AI-driven landscape, education has always been humanity’s way of passing knowledge forward and expanding our collective potential. Every major breakthrough from the printing press to artificial intelligence reshaped human development. But inventions alone are not enough; it takes an educated population to absorb, scale, and build upon these discoveries.

When education breaks down, the damage ripples through every facet of society. Early warning signs like underfunding and teacher shortages compound into systemic failure. The cost is multi-dimensional: cultural apathy, social division, economic stagnation, and the erosion of ethical and moral values.

In South Africa, this breakdown has deep historical roots. Our educational history is defined by a dual system. For the privileged minority and another for the black majority. Even after 1994, this duality persists, featuring different schools, different futures, and the same postcode leading to vastly different destinies. Until this duality ends, the inequality endures. While the 1994 Constitution enshrined education as a fundamental human right under Section 29, incomplete implementation, unequal resource distribution, weak governance, and socio-economic challenges created a trajectory of systemic failure, leaving generations of youth vulnerable.

This systemic educational failure manifests sharply in our labour market data. South Africa has experienced a profound regression in our industrial sectors as the country deindustrializes. Manufacturing’s contribution to GDP has fallen from 14% in 1994 to roughly 10% today, while manufacturing employment has collapsed, shedding approximately 700,000 jobs down to about 1.0 million workers.

Look closely at the structural shift in our employment figures: while productive and asset-intensive manufacturing sectors have shrunk, we see an exponential expansion in the security sector. Investigation and security activities recorded the single largest net increase in jobs at over 71,570 positions. An economy where security grows while production stalls is an economy in distress hit hardest by youth unemployment rates exceeding 60%, to the absolute detriment of our young school leavers.

How does the state allocate its resources to address these pressures? In the 2024/25 fiscal year, total government spending sits at R2.37 trillion. Here we see a stark imbalance: massive growth in the welfare and social protection budget with social development receiving R387.3 billion (16.3%) vastly outpaces direct investment in the economic sector, which receives only R255.4 billion (10.8%).
Furthermore, while the state pours a huge investment into education allocating R324.5 billion to basic education and R244 billion to post-school education we suffer from a low return on investment. High dropout rates, literacy backlogs, and systemic inefficiencies mean that massive fiscal inputs are not translating into the skilled, productive human capital our economy desperately requires.

Rights in the Constitution do not realize themselves. They require six interdependent pillars working together: ethical leadership, sound policies, effective institutions, social development, robust governance, and crucially, a quality education system that produces skilled, productive citizens.

There is a virtuous cycle: economic growth increases fiscal revenues, which funds quality education, producing a skilled workforce that drives further innovation and growth. To jumpstart this in South Africa, we must execute eight clear solutions: prioritize early childhood development, fix basic school infrastructure, recruit and support top-tier teachers, leverage digital technology, enforce accountability, and partner robustly with the private sector.

Let us close with this thought: “In the story of one’s life, education is the chapter that defines one’s journey.” By fixing our educational foundations and aligning our fiscal and industrial policies, we can reverse deindustrialization, empower our youth, and fulfil the promise of a prosperous, equitable South Africa for all.