The South African rand sagged against the US dollar early on Tuesday as investors’ persistent concern about the slow growth of the economy took its toll.

The South African unit touched a low of R9.74 against the US dollar after Statistics South Africa (StatsSA) issued poor economic growth numbers for the first quarter of this year.

The rand weakened against a basket of currencies including the Euro and the British Pound (GBP) early on Tuesday. It reached R12.59 against the Euro and R14.71 against British Pound.

In the first quarter of this year, South Africa’s economy slackened severely to a 0.9 percent growth, according to StatsSA.

This shows that Africa’s biggest economy is battling to resume the growth speed it since lost shortly before the outbreak of the global economic downturn in 2007.

Elna Moolman, an economist at Macquarie, said some of the softness in the economy in the first quarter was due to short term disturbances like the labour actions.

These supported the marked shrinkage in the manufacturing sector and the economy should ultimately recuperate from those, she said.

“However, we have for some time been concerned about the possibility that economic growth might not accelerate in 2013 as is generally expected, and today’s data increases this risk,” she said in a note.

Peter Attard Montalto, an emerging market economist at Nomura Group, said the South African Reserve Bank’s (SARB) weaker GDP forecast last week meant they were partially anticipating limitations in the economy.

“But this still probably surprised them (SARB) to the downside and we will lower our 2.6 percent forecast for the year further still,” Montalto said.

“Overall we can see that despite the end of the peak of the strikes and knock on impacts to the rest of the economy remain severe combined with the much weaker export picture and loss of sentiment have all weighted.”

Aggressive labour action in the mining sector since August last year has been impacting negatively on economic growth in South Africa.