Narrow view of middle class
THE LATEST STUDY ON THIS GROWING SECTOR IS GUIDED BY A PARTICULAR INTEREST AND ECHOES A POORLY INFORMED NARRATIVE,WHICH IS NOT BASED ON REALITY ABOUT THE STRUCTURE OF AFRICAN SOCIETIES,WRITES
THE AFRICAN middle class is of huge interest to business. This was confirmed again recently at a seminar where the study “African Lions: groundbreaking study on the middle class in subsaharan Africa” was discussed.
The African Development Bank’s diagnosis is that the African middle class has grown by over 240% in just over a decade, and the bank defines 15 million households as being middle class.
The study is guided by a particular interest and echoes a poorly informed narrative about the structure of societies in Africa. It is void of any class-related analysis and offers little bearing on reality. People are seen only as consumers with no political relevance.
The study was done by the University of Cape Town’s Unilever Institute of Strategic Marketing and the global market research company Ipsos over 18 months in 10 cities – Abidjan, Accra, Addis Ababa, Douala, Dar es Salaam, Kano, Lagos, Nairobi, Luanda and Lusaka.
HENNING MELBER
It defines as middle class someone who has a daily income of between $4 (R57) and $70. He or she also has a disposable income, is employed or is running a business or studying at college, and has some secondary school education.
According to this criteria, 60% of the urban population surveyed fall into this definition of middle class.
The researchers conclude that those who qualify as middle class have an average income of $12 a day and an average household income of $17 a day. A third had a full time job, while many ran informal businesses.
An estimated 100 million people outside South Africa have an aggregated spending power of more than $400 million a day. The research is motivated by economic interests, targeting the so-called middle class as the object of desire for retailers.
As the head of the institute explained, the core of the interest in the R1.3 trillion-a-month market was a better understanding of the consumer landscape.
Large companies paid $1 160 and small ones $510 to gain insights into the investment opportunities at a recent Middle East and Africa Summit in Stockholm.
The second day was devoted to sub-saharan Africa, which was described as having a bulging middle class hungry for inclusion and more sophisticated consumer demands.
But no insights are offered into how being middle class could be understood in a social context.
This would include status and awareness as well as the political choices people make. This would require a different, analytically more ambitious grasp of the economic and political realities.
Scholars have started to critically explore the middle-class notion.
This is important because a middleclass debate reduced purely to the exploration of consumer habits can be used for self-serving purposes.
They offer a deeper analysis of cultural factors and identities, consciousness, social positioning and relations to other groups as well as institutions and the state.
They are on their way to a proper class analysis and the policy options and implications by the social group or groups in formation. These rest on the assumption that relatively high economic growth rates suggest progress and development.
Meanwhile, little changes in the daily lives of most people. Crumbs from the table of the haves don’t lift them out of a fragile socio-economic habitat bordering on poverty. Many urban and rural people continue to exist in destitution. – The Conversation
Melber is a professor of political science at the University of Pretoria.