Wealth gap needs action
SOUTH Africa is sitting on the open tinderbox of a counter-revolution – with those who can afford to idly puffi on cigars next to it. On Monday, as the globe’s leaders, bankers, economists and associated brains trusts gathered in Davos, Switzerland, to network, Oxfam released a damning report about the world’s wealth distribution.
It makes for truly depressing reading, as it ought to.
As our leaders prepared for the 48th edition of the World Economic Forum, they would have been chilled – not by the Alpine gusts, but the knowledge that 1% of the world enjoyed 82% of the wealth created last year, while half the world got nothing.
Billionaires have seen their wealth increase by 13% a year since 2010 – six times faster each year than the wages of ordinary workers.
In South Africa, one of the most unequal societies on Earth, the bestpaid executive at Shoprite will take less than a week to earn what a temporary farm worker in the Western Cape will earn in a 50-year career.
The top 10% of our society will earn half of all wage income, while the bottom half will make do with less than a quarter of that.
It’s an obscenity that festers long after the political dividend of the end of apartheid in 1994. For almost an entire generation, the citizens of this country have been promised the chimera of a better life for all.
The truth, for the millions of South Africans who find themselves not just unemployed, but unemployable, dependent upon government grants for survival, is that they might be politically free, but they are still economically enslaved.
The government might have given them proper houses, but they can barely afford the electricity to light them or the water to flush their toilets.
To make matters worse, they have to read about money which could have been used to fund free tertiary education or create jobs that has been looted by an unscrupulous, politically connected minority.
Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa has to do more than just convince the world’s bankers this week – he has to come home and start rebuilding this country – before it is too late.