Malusi Gigaba talks on responsible leadership

MINISTER of Finance Malusi Gigaba addressed delegates at the Black Business Council at a dinner in Rosebank last night. His message centred around responsible leadership. “The biggest challenge of our time, one towards which our leadership is most urgently summonsed, is to transform the South African economy – to grow it in an inclusive manner,” Gigaba said. “Our economy must reduce inequalities, significantly decrease the scourge of unemployment and eliminate poverty. The economy we have today is still largely informed by, and still reflects, our colonial and apartheid past. It is highly carbon intensive, based on the extraction and export of raw minerals while importing finished goods, and it is de-industrialising. It consists largely of oligopolistic industries, with low competition and high barriers to entry. It is highly unequal, with huge concentrations of wealth among a tiny portion of the population. It is highly exclusive on the basis of race, gender and class. Oxfam estimates that just 3 South African billionaires own wealth equivalent to the bottom half our population. Three citizens, own more wealth than 28 million other citizens combined.

Wealth

“They further estimate that the richest 1 percent of our population owns 42 percent of the wealth. The top 10 percent of our population own 95 percent of the wealth,” said Gigaba. “Is this the basis for a stable society, a united, prosperous and democratic society?” Gigaba said there are currently 5.7 million South Africans who want to work and are not able to, a further 2.4 million are discouraged from joining the labour force, and 40 percent of the unemployed have been unemployed for more than three years. He warned that “Our inability to transform the economy has left the poor particularly vulnerable to shocks to economic growth. It is this fundamental exclusion from the dignity, stability and opportunity of decent, wellpaying work, of ownership of homes, land and other assets that is at the root of the national grievance in our country and of our society’s instability”. He continued by saying that it is only because black dispossession has been normalised in our society, that some are shocked or even offended by the call for radical economic transformation.