South Africa may have gone a long way to addressing racial injustices but there is a growing acceptance that its huge wealth gap threatens to derail the achievements of the post-apartheid era.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which shone the light on abuses committed by all sides during white-only rule, is credited with playing a major role in reconciling the races of the Rainbow Nation.
But, 10 years on from the start of hearings, commission chairperson Desmond Tutu and other observers acknowledge that the body only managed to scratch at the surface of some of the other deep-rooted inequalities that still remain.
”We could have narrowed the gap between the rich and the poor,” Tutu told Agence France-Presse on the sidelines of a conference last week that brought together relatives of victims as well as some of those who presided over the harrowing testimony.
”We could have done [a] great deal better in the eradication of poverty … in improving the quality of life of everyone,” added the Nobel-prize winning Anglican archbishop.
Although recent figures have shown a slight drop, South Africa’s remains one of the most crime-ridden countries in the world. And while a black middle-class is beginning to emerge, the average white South African’s standard of living remains way ahead of the black majority’s.
Mamphela Ramphele, a former World Bank managing director, said the TRC had been too limited in its objectives and should have sought to redress the economic inequalities.
”We were timid in our formulation of the terms of reference of the TRC,” she said at the conference. ”Leaving out crimes committed in socio-economic terms in our country was a grave mistake.
”The majority of people in this country continue to bleed and their pain is totally unacknowledged — people who were deliberately impoverished.”
The country’s current crime problem can be partly ascribed to this, added Ramphele.
”By walking away from social-economic injustice, we mustn’t be surprised by the level of frustration, anger and rage that is seeping through our streets.”
Even victims of crime who attended the conference acknowledged that poverty has been the motivating factor for the perpetrators.
One of the panellists, 68-year-old Pauline Nossel, told how she and her invalid husband were recently hijacked by a group of men who kept apologising, bought the couple a bottle of water each, and advised her to buy a smaller car with her insurance pay-out ”because we are not interested in small cars”.
Even though a frightful experience, she said she had sympathy for her kidnappers’ situation and appreciation for their kindness.
”One of them said: ‘We don’t want to hurt people. We don’t have opportunities and there is no money’,” she recounted.
Nobel prize-winning author Nadine Gordimer struck a similarly reflective stance after she was robbed in her Johannesburg home last month.
”One grabbed me and had his arm across me. It was a muscular, smooth arm and I thought, ‘Shouldn’t there be a better use for these hands, this arm than robbing an old woman?’,” she told Britain’s Guardian newspaper.
”What a waste of four young men. They should have jobs,” she added. — Sapa-AFP