She’s reframing the whole conversation about youth debt in South Africa, and arguing that the problem we’ve been told to fix isn’t the problem at all. There’s a question that follows millions of South Africans into the supermarket, into the petrol station parking lot, into the back of the taxi at the end of a long month. Where did I go wrong?
It surfaces when the store card statement arrives, when the bond hasn’t been paid. When the airtime runs out, three days before payday. We’re taught to read these moments as proof of personal failure, proof that we should have saved more, spent less, been smarter with what little we had. We carry the shame quietly, between ourselves and our bank accounts, between ourselves and our partners. We tell ourselves we’ll do better next month.
Dr Nthabiseng Moleko thinks we’ve been asking the wrong question.
She’s a Development Economist at Stellenbosch Business School and Chairperson of the National Empowerment Fund. She sits on some of the most consequential boards in South African finance, including the Presidential B-BBEE Advisory Council, the Development Bank of Southern Africa’s Infrastructure Fund advisory committee, and the Sanlam Umbrella Fund board. She’s, in other words, an insider’s insider. This makes what she has to say about debt in South Africa unusual and worth listening to carefully.
The Number That Tells the Story
Vantage’s own data shows that nearly 40% of our new debt counselling clients are under 35, almost double the figure from four years ago. As an economist, what does that single number tell you about the South African economy?
“That number tells me that South Africa is increasingly relying on debt to compensate for a lack of productive economic inclusion,” she says. Read that line again. It doesn’t say young people are spending too much. It doesn’t say they need better budgeting apps. It says South Africa is using debt to paper over the fact that millions of young people have been locked out of meaningful participation in the economy.
“When a growing share of young people enter debt counselling, it is not primarily a story about poor financial choices,” she continues. “It is a story about an economy that has failed to generate sufficient employment, income growth, and opportunities for asset ownership for younger generations.”
For more than a decade, she explains, the country has lived with low growth, weak job creation, and persistent youth unemployment. In that environment, credit becomes something other than what it was designed to be. It stops being a tool for building something. It becomes a tool for surviving.
“What concerns me most is that debt is increasingly becoming the entry point into the economy for young South Africans, rather than employment, entrepreneurship or asset accumulation. That is a warning sign.”
Why It’s Easier to Get a Store Card Than a Home Loan
Over 80% of under-35s in South Africa now hold store cards, often before they have any savings, sometimes before they even have a stable income. Are credit providers behaving the way you’d expect a healthy market to behave, or is something more troubling happening here?
“Credit providers are responding rationally to market incentives,” she says, “but the broader system may not be producing healthy developmental outcomes.” It’s a useful distinction. The retailers aren’t villains. The lenders aren’t cackling in dark rooms. They’re doing what markets do, chasing the lowest-risk, highest-return opportunities. The problem is what those opportunities have become
“A healthy economy channels finance toward productive activity: education, housing, enterprise development, infrastructure and business formation. What we’re increasingly seeing is finance flowing toward consumption because productive opportunities are limited.”‘That sentence carries the whole argument. When young people can get a store card more easily than a home loan or a business loan, the financial system isn’t just being lazy. It’s making a quiet decision about where to put its money. It’s deciding that funding your next pair of takkies is safer than funding the small business you might build.
“The result is a cycle where exclusion generates indebtedness, and indebtedness makes inclusion even harder.”
The Money Is Here. Where Is It Going?
South Africa’s institutional capital pension funds, the PIC, and development finance institutions sit on trillions of rands, while young workers are withdrawing billions from their own retirement savings to cover groceries. Do you think the money in this country can be allocated toward solving the youth debt crisis, and where do you think the government could most meaningfully intervene?
“Yes,” she says. “The challenge is not that South Africa lacks capital. The challenge is how capital is allocated.” It’s a sentence worth sitting with. There’s enough money in this country. The pension funds you contribute to every month. The development finance institutions you’ve probably never heard of, the Public Investment Corporation. Trillions of rands, sitting and being managed.
“Pension funds, development finance institutions and public finance vehicles should play a larger role in expanding productive sectors that create jobs, making deliberative investments in infrastructure, supporting industrialisation and broadening economic participation.” What she’s calling for isn’t radical. It’s the kind of strategy used by developing economies around the world to lift their workforces. The question isn’t whether the money exists. The question is what we ask it to do.
“The most meaningful intervention the government could make is not debt relief alone. It is creating pathways into sustainable income generation. That means financing youth-owned enterprises, supporting labour-intensive industries, investing in infrastructure and expanding access to productive assets.”
Then comes the line that lands the whole argument: “If we only focus on helping young people manage debt, we treat the symptom. If we focus on productive inclusion, we address the cause.”
Built as Consumers, Not Producers
There’s a growing trend of young South Africans being aggressively targeted with credit-consumption products, such as store cards, buy-now-pay-later, and personal loans, rather than wealth-building products like home loans or business finance. As someone who has long argued for production-based inclusion, how do you read this moment?
“This is the clearest indication of an economy that has failed to create gainful employment opportunities for young people, who live in a reality of rapidly rising prices and inflation.”The phrase she keeps returning to is production-based inclusion. It’s worth understanding what she means by it.
“Production-based inclusion means bringing people into ownership, enterprise development, manufacturing, agriculture, infrastructure development and other productive sectors of the economy. Those activities generate incomes and assets that endure.”
The contrast she draws is between two ways of participating in an economy. You can be brought in as a producer, someone who owns a piece of something, builds something, or makes something. Or you can be brought in as a consumer, someone whose only role is to buy.
“What worries me is that many young South Africans are being integrated into the economy primarily as consumers rather than producers. They are encouraged to borrow and spend before they have had an opportunity to build assets, skills or businesses.” A generation that was promised inclusion has been given a credit card instead.
“An economy cannot sustainably reduce inequality by expanding consumption alone. It must expand production, ownership and participation.”
When the Rules Aren’t Written for You
For a young South African earning R6,000 a month, the standard rules of personal finance save, invest, build credit feel like a script written for someone else. What’s the actual playbook, and what should the financial industry stop pretending about?
“The financial industry needs to acknowledge that personal finance cannot solve structural economic problems.” Coming from someone of Dr Moleko’s standing, this is a big statement. The financial literacy movement, the apps, the courses, the daily money tips sit on a single assumption: that the rules work, you just need to learn them. She’s saying out loud what many people have sensed quietly. The rules don’t work for everyone.
“It is difficult to save meaningfully when income barely covers food, transport to work and housing. It is difficult to invest when employment is insecure. And it is difficult to build wealth when asset ownership remains out of reach.”
But she’s careful, and this matters not to let people off the hook entirely.
“That does not mean financial discipline is irrelevant. It remains important. But we must acknowledge the hard truths, including that budgeting alone cannot overcome an economy characterised by high unemployment, low growth, low incomes and deep inequality.”
Then comes the most impactful line in her entire interview: “For young people, the most important financial asset is often not a financial product at all. It is employability, skills, networks, entrepreneurship and access to opportunities that increase earning potential over time.” The most powerful thing you can grow, in other words, isn’t your savings. It’s your earning capacity.
What She’d Tell the Finance Minister
If you had thirty minutes alone with the Finance Minister to discuss youth economic exclusion, what would you tell him, and where do you think he would push back on you hardest?
“I would tell him that youth exclusion is not a social issue sitting on the margins of economic policy,” she says. “It is the central economic issue.”This is where her economist’s voice gets sharpest. She has done the maths, and the maths are unambiguous.
“Every decent job created is an investment that impacts the country on three levels. One, it changes a young person’s life. Two, it uplifts their households and families. Three, it increases the national fiscus, which can fund more investment and social programmes in the country.” And the pushback she’d expect? “The pushback would likely come around fiscal constraints. Treasury would argue that resources are limited and that debt sustainability must remain a priority.”
Her response is the kind of line that gets remembered: “Long-term fiscal sustainability ultimately depends on economic growth and employment. Exclusion carries a fiscal cost, too. The question is not whether we can afford to invest in inclusion, but whether we can afford not to.”
What She Wants You to Hear
If a reader takes only one thing from this feature today, not a tip, but an insight that genuinely changes how they see their own situation, what would you want it to be?
“I would want them to understand that many of the financial pressures they face are not simply personal failures. They are occurring within a broader economic system that has not created enough pathways into meaningful economic participation.” She’s deliberate, again, about not letting people off the hook completely. “Recognising structural constraints does not remove personal responsibility. But it does help people understand that their struggle is shared by millions of others facing the same economic realities.”
Then the line the whole conversation has been building toward: “South Africa’s future depends on expanding opportunity, ownership and productive participation. Young people are not the problem that needs fixing. They are the economic potential that needs to be unlocked.”
So what stays with you
What stays with you from a conversation with Dr Moleko isn’t the data, although there’s plenty of it. It isn’t even the policy prescriptions, though they’re clear and well-argued. What stays with you is the reframing.
The story of South African debt is usually told one household at a time. One overdrawn account. One overdue cellphone bill. One person who should have known better. Moleko refuses to tell it that way. She zooms out and shows you the same picture from a thousand feet higher, and from up there, what looked like millions of personal failures starts to look like a single, recognisable shape. It’s the shape of an economy that hasn’t made enough room for its people.
That doesn’t make the debt go away. But it changes the question you bring to it. Instead of asking “What’s wrong with me?” you can ask “What’s the world I’m living in, and how do I move through it?”
It’s a quieter question. But it might be the more useful one.
This interview is part of Stretching Rands Together, our weekly series featuring South African voices on debt, money, and the systems that shape our lives.
Follow Dr Moleko on the following platforms:
Instagram: @drnthabimoleko