From reading various blogs and columns in the past few months, there seems to be a general feeling of despair, with increasing talk of a revived wave of emigration from the country — and not just among white people.
The concerns cited include crime, the economy, political instability and what the real reasons were behind the xenophobia attacks. Although concerns about the economy can be put down to rising food and fuel costs, which are global phenomena and pretty much out of our control, the other issues are more difficult to explain.
The topic of a recent Sunday Times headline and one of the more controversial questions directed to ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe after his recent talk to the investment community addressed the issues of the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few elite from both the private and government sectors. Mantashe spoke of how important it is for economic empowerment to be broad-based, but failed to provide any direction on what could be done to address the issue.
The distribution of wealth in post-apartheid South Africa has become more unequal, ironically exacerbated by the policies originally meant to reduce the inequalities of the past. Although the distribution of wealth between black and white is less un-equal, overall inequality has grown. Thus the difference between the poorest and the wealthiest people in the country is more pronounced.
The question often asked at this point is: Does inequality matter if poverty is addressed? The answer is: it does. It matters if we are to stem the levels of crime and xenophobia and ensure political stability. The issue is simple: does an already wealthy businessman or politician need to earn another billion rand through paper deals while so many live without the basics? Can someone with a net asset worth of more than R5-million be classified as “disadvantaged”? Is our income-tax system sufficiently progressive?
We live in a society that has declared that you have succeeded only when you own a luxury car and drink absurdly expensive alcohol. Is it then a wonder that young, uneducated men, living in ghettos without the remote possibility of ever attaining this aspirational ideal through legal means, join the high-flying criminal syndicates as the only way to enjoy “success”? Having lived with high levels of crime for so long, criminality has almost become a profession; crime is normalised.
On holiday in Turkey last month we were amazed to see goods left in open-air bazaars overnight without any security at all. Goods are left on open-air tables where no one even considers the possibility of someone taking anything — an amazing sight for a South African.
Turkey is not much wealthier than South Africa: it is also a middle-income country with about $10 000 annual per capita income — it just has a lower level of inequality. There were no slums or townships — not that we could see — and even blue-collar workers live in decent housing. In terms of the state of the economy, South Africa is ahead of Turkey on several measures including external debt ratings and fiscal and monetary policy management, but in infant mortality, life expectancy and income distribution we lag far behind. (Visit http://tools.google.com/gapminder for a wake-up call.)
Although solving the vexing crime issue and ensuring a stable political future might require many-pronged approaches, it seems that addressing the inequality issue is critical. How to go about this is the tricky part. But as a parting suggestion: How about requiring that all future black economic empowerment (BEE) deals allocate their shares to large regional community development trusts instead of individuals, with the funds to be used in the upliftment of the poorest of the poor?
Then perhaps we would see some constructive BEE competition with, for example, the MTN BEE development trust in the Eastern Cape trying its best to outperform the Vodacom BEE development trust in Limpopo, hopefully reducing inequality “everywhere you gogo”. Yebo!