South Africa’s income gap remains wide: census
Blacks earn six times less than whites
JOHANNESBURG — White South Africans still take home six times more pay than their black counterparts, 18 years after the end of apartheid and despite the incomes of black households surging 169 per cent in the past decade, the country’s latest census has disclosed.
The survey, the first in 10 years, showed that despite a fast-growing black middle class boosted by employment laws designed to redress historic imbalances, there are still major disparities between the overall education and income levels of South Africa’s different races.
South African President Jacob Zuma hailed the results as “the tale of our national pride,” pointing to the halving of numbers of those living without basic services such as water, sanitation and electricity across the country since 2001.
But he conceded that much more needed to be done. “These figures tell us that at the bottom of the rung is the black majority who continue to be confronted by deep poverty, unemployment and inequality, despite the progress that we have made since 1994,” he said.
According to the census, black people now make up nearly eight in 10 of the 51.8 million population. Fewer than one in 10 is white. Only 35 per cent of black people under the age of 20 passed their final exams at high school, compared with 76 per cent of the white population. Among black people ages 15 to 64, 35 per cent were employed compared with 69 per cent of the white population.
Overall, household incomes more than doubled in the past 10 years: The average now stands at about $11,900 Cdn, up from $5,600 in 2001.But white households earned on average about six times more a year than black households, $42,200, despite the fact that black households have on average more people living in them, and despite an increase in the average black salary of 169 per cent.
In a 2006 survey of incomes, white households were shown to earn 7.5 times as much as black households. Analysts estimated that at the same rate of development, it would take until 2061 for black and white families to bring home the same salaries
he statistics come after Zuma denied a claim by his deputy, Kgalema Motlanthe — who is expected to launch a leadership challenge in the coming months — that the country was at a “tipping point” following the shooting deaths of 34 miners by police in August, violent strikes across the country and South Africa’s downgrading by several ratings agencies.
“To us, South Africa is not in a crisis,” he told the Foreign Correspondents Association in Johannesburg. “Tipping from where to where?”