Professor Colin Bundy
Inequality in Post Apartheid South Africa: Its History and Its Characteristics
Professor Colin Bundy - Inequality in Post Apartheid South Africa
- Evening everybody. Evening from England. And my apologies for the technological disaster. I’m talking about South African poverty and inequality. South Africa today displays widespread, severe, and persistent chronic poverty. A World Bank report in 2018 found that nearly half the population, 49%, live in chronic poverty. The second segment, 14%, they identify as the transient poor. They move in and out of poverty. And the third section they call non-poor but vulnerable, people whose basic needs currently are met, but are statistically likely to slip into poverty. In other words, for 76% of the population, poverty is a constant threat in their daily lives. And the same report indicates that, I’m quoting “By any measure, South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world.” And the leading scholar on inequality, the Swedish sociologist, Goran Therborn, in 2019, was asked where he would locate South Africa in an international perspective. His answer was emphatic. “South Africa, income-wise, is the most unequal country on earth.” And he was asked why this was so, and he offered this hypothesis. He said, “My guess is that the extraordinary economic inequality derives from settler colonialism, its trajectory and its enduring legacy. Now, this evening I’m going to expand upon Therborn’s hypothesis. I want to show how the colonial era did shape the history of poverty and inequality.
And in addition, I argue also that the specific nature of South African capitalism in the 20th century also possessed distinct features and is equally important in shaping the contours of today’s inequality. And my starting point, my central premise, is that poverty and inequality are like other human phenomena. They have their own history. Poverty and inequality have causes and consequences. They change over time and their past shapes their present form. And let me make a basic distinction between poverty and inequality. Poverty is the inability to meet the basic needs of shelter and subsistence. People in poverty, poor people, live shorter lives and they have more diseases. They lack access to basic services and they suffer from social discrimination and exclusion. Inequality is the disparity or the unevenness in the distribution of income, resources and opportunities in any given population. Let me begin by reminding you that South Africa was colonised first by the Dutch. For a century and a half, From 1652 to 1795, the Dutch ruled the Cape, the Cape Colony. And then from 1795, Britain ousted the Dutch East India Company and became the dominant colonial presence. During the Dutch period, slavery was introduced to the Cape, and by the eve of abolition in the 1830s, there were about 40,000 slaves in the Cape. And these slaves, freed slaves, and their descendants left, formed a distinct stratum of poverty in the Cape, an inherited poverty of the descendants of slaves. During the 17th and especially the 18th century, Dutch farmers or Boers, moved north and east.
They moved into the lands occupied by the hunter gatherers, the San and the pasteurers, the stock herders, the Khoikhoi. And these peoples, the Khoi and the San, were absorbed as a defeated, broken people, into the frontier economy as a colonial workforce. They were the first numerous group in Sub-Saharan Africa who were indisputably pauperized by losing resources. In other words, slavery was replaced on the frontier by other forms of unfree labour, coerced labour. And then the arrival of the British saw a more powerful colonial power press further east, this time into areas populated by African kingdoms, especially the Xhosa speakers, who farmed and read, ran herds of cattle and sheep. And the result of this encounter was a series of colonial wars, which lasted for some six decades. The frontier wars or the wars of dispossession. During these wars, colonial militias destroyed Xhosa power, seized their land, and drove men, women, and children onto the labour market. Writing 75 years ago, Cornelis de Kiewiet, a great South African historian, went to the heart of the matter. "The land laws were also labour laws.” He wrote. By the 1860s, British power had been consolidated.
The Cape was much larger, and a new colony, Natal, had been formed in the southeast, of what is today South Africa. And beyond those two colonies, the Cape and Natal, Afrikaner Trekkers moved north and west, into the central highlands, where they created two republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, in the central highlands of South Africa. And then, so you’ve got those four white polities surrounded by independent African polities. But then during the final decades of the 19th century, two developments transformed South Africa. The first was the discovery of diamonds and then gold. These precious minerals drew fortune hunters from many countries. They stimulated massive foreign investment and quite rapidly, their production was dominated by large, monopolistic mining companies. They created a labour force with a skilled white artisan base and a massive black unskilled migrant workforce. The second development of these years, the closing years of the 19th century, was a series of decisive imperial interventions by British troops. The key drivers in imperial policy, this was the period known as the new imperialism, and the key policy drivers were a concern to control access to the minerals that had been discovered, and secondly, to secure the labour supply necessary to extract these minerals. And wars and annexations completed the conquest of African societies, the best known of these wars being 1879, the Zulu War. And then from 1899 to 1902, took place the largest British military engagement prior to 1914.
This was the South African War or sometimes called the Boer War, which brought Boer independence to a close. By 1910, the two defeated Boer Republics and the two British Colonies were joined in a new state, the Union of South Africa. And with that new area, wherever the African population was concentrated, they were zoned off into what were called Native Reserves. These dramatic developments intensified inequality in three main ways. Firstly, this completely different scale of the demand for labour, on the mines, in the new cities, along the lines of rail, led to the development of a system of labour migrancy. Very large numbers of African men journeyed to the cities on fixed contracts, at low wages, and returned to their rural homes in the reserves at the end of each period, so large scale migrant labour. Secondly, the system of reserves was formalised in the 1913 Land Act, which allocated about 13% of the territory of the country to Africans, that is created the reserves in this 13% of the country, while denying them the right to acquire property in the rest of the country. These reserves later became known as Homelands, or as I’ll call them, Bantustans. And it’s a policy that relegated very large numbers of Africans to existence in overcrowded and overstocked rural areas. And then the third thing that happened immediately before and after the South African War, there was a significant hardening of racial attitudes.
Racial segregation of towns and cities became the norm. Successive Union governments insisted that urban blacks should be migrant workers, segregated from white society. Those Africans who did move to urban areas on a permanent basis rather than as migrant workers, were confined to specific Locations, as they were called, or Townships as they came later to be known. Their movements to the cities strictly controlled by pass laws. And that’s the basis upon which the new Union of South Africa entered the 20th century. And between 1910 and about 1980, South Africa urbanised, industrialised, and modernised. And over those seven decades, inequality was not only entrenched but became more pronounced. From 1910 onwards, segregation became a systematic and pervasive feature in South African society. Key features saw the domination of the political system by whites, the division of rural land, which I’ve mentioned, into white owned areas and African reserves, and stringent restrictions on the rights of Africans to move to urban areas, as well as a taken for granted segregation of schools, churches, hospitals, and public parks. And then in 1948, election victory by the National Party introduced the policies of apartheid. These made segregation more systematic and discrimination more absolute. White minority rule became more authoritarian, increasingly relying upon bureaucratic and coercive muscle. But both before and after 1948, it was South Africa’s economy that developed distinctive features which directly increased inequality.
Firstly, there was a barrage of legislation which affected the workplace, who could do what work, at what levels of pay, and with what rights. 1920s and 1930s, there was considerable anxiety amongst white politicians about what was known as the poor white problem. This was the flocking to cities of large numbers of poor Afrikaners, Afrikaans speaking whites who’d been forced off their land. And the Afrikaner National Party and the Labour Party formed a coalition government. They passed laws that protected white workers and crucially excluded African workers from skilled and semi-skilled jobs. This was a policy known as job reservation. Reserving, preserving a whole range of jobs only for white and for Coloured, that is mixed race, workers. Alongside this new legislation regulated the system of industrial relations, the creation of trade unions, the rules for collective bargaining and so on. And in this legislation, Africans were excluded, were excluded from the very definition of employee, in terms of industrial relations, so that they were simply excluded from recognised trade unions. They were also shut out from the apprentice system. In other words, the great majority, almost all African workers at this stage, 1920s and 1930s, were locked into a low wage regime, deliberately maintained by state policy. In addressing the poor white problem, in the short term, there was an ambitious programme of public works to create jobs for the unskilled White workers during the Great Depression, a little bit like the New Deal in America, job creation for the unemployed.
But in the longer term, there was a sustained expansion of state services for whites, health, education and housing, and the creation of a very generous pension scheme. Pensions initially, were paid to white and Coloured men and women. Whites received about twice as much as Coloureds, while Africans and Indians were entirely excluded. African pensions began to be paid in the 1940s, I’ll return to that a bit later. But by 1939, South Africa had created the basis of a welfare state, but a highly racialized one. Whites and to a lesser extent, Coloureds, were the beneficiaries, Indians and Africans almost entirely excluded. By the 1940s, white poverty was to all practical purposes, solved. The solution of the poor white problem had profound and lasting implications for black poverty, especially under apartheid. To begin with, under apartheid, there was a long-term concentration of poverty in rural areas, both on white owned farms, where about 3 million African workers lived, and in the Reserves or Bantustans. Farm workers formed an exceptionally miserable proletariat, with low levels of education, resources, income, expectations or power. They were denied mobility. They were yoked to their employers and padlocked to poverty. Larger proportion that Africans experienced poverty in the Reserves or Bantustans. In 1948, 39% of Africans lived in Reserves, but under apartheid, three and a half million Africans were forcibly removed from towns or from land that they had bought before 1910 in what it now White South Africa, so that by 1970, the Bantustans housed 47% of all Africans. And by 1980, a staggering 52.7%. So under apartheid, Africans are pushed back into the Reserve areas from cities and poverty there increased.
But I want to dwell just for a couple of minutes on the 1970s and 1980s, because in these years there were important patterns of changes in patterns of poverty and inequality. The National Party remained in power but faced unprecedented problems. In particular, the South African economy never recovered from the shock of the oil crisis In 1973, the OPEC oil crisis, and its performance lagged other advanced and middle income economies. A key response to these difficulties was to reverse or halt a series of apartheid projects. Black trade unions were now recognised and could enter collective bargaining. Job reservation was jettisoned even before it was formally repealed in 1979. So a permanently urbanised, better educated, and more skilled African working class emerged in the cities and black workers began moving into jobs previously dominated by whites. And after the shock of the 1976 Soweto School uprising, the National Party sought to cultivate an urban black middle class as a bulwark against revolution. So access by Africans to higher education was accelerated, home ownership was promoted, restrictions on black business were lifted, and many more Africans entered public sector jobs. At the same time, this is the 1980s, social spending on education, health, welfare, and pensions, moved in a more egalitarian direction. As apartheid certainties began to fray, the National Party increased the value of the old age pension paid to Africans, while that paid to whites declined. In 1966, the pensions paid to Africans was worth 13% of that pay to whites. By 1986, it was worth 39%. But by 1993, all pensioners, old age pensioners, received the same amount. 1975, whites received more than half of the total social spending, by 1993, only one sixth.
And it was these trends that I’ve been describing in the seventies and eighties, the consolidation of a black working class, a rapidly growing black middle class, and so significant redistribution through state spending had three main outcomes. Firstly, the major beneficiaries were black urban insiders, people with rights to stay in the cities, especially skilled and semi-skilled workers and white collar workers. They enjoyed opportunities unimagined by their parents, and they were offered a long-term escape from poverty. Secondly, even the harshest forms of poverty in the rural areas were mitigated to a degree by the new spending, especially on pensions. And then the other thing that was happening, is that differentiation within the black population began to become more marked. The gains made by urban insider were accompanied by new forms of misery and persistent hardship by outsiders, people living in the squatter camps or informal settlements and people still living in the reserves. But the single most important source of new forms of poverty and inequality during these later apartheid years was the emergence of structural unemployment on a mass scale. Beginning in the 1970s, but gathering pace in the 1980s, South Africa’s economy underwent an historic shift, from labour shortages to a labour surplus. From the 1980s, poverty correlated directly with joblessness.
Can we have the first slide, please? Okay. This is based on World Bank indicators and staff calculations. The blue columns are an average for emerging markets, markets often compared with South Africa, Turkey, Indonesia, Philippines, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and so on. And you can see that the overall unemployment rate in South Africa at about 28% in this graph, much higher than the 7% for emerging markets, but especially for the youth of South Africa, you’ve got this towering figure here, nearly 55%, against an international average of about 16%. Thank you very much for that slide. By 1994, when Nelson Mandela took office, there were between 4 and 6 million people unable to find work. Half of the population lived in a household with at least one unemployed adult. And amongst the unemployed, those who were less educated, less skilled and less urbanised, had very little prospect at all of finding a job, even in the mid to long term. And unemployment for young black men, as you saw, was particularly high so that two of every three black youngsters who wanted work could not find it. Unemployment on this scale was a central legacy of apartheid inherited by Mandela’s government. And here, I’m now going to move to poverty and inequality in post-apartheid South Africa, 1994 onwards. And it might be useful if I just sketch a very, very thumbnail sketch of what’s happened to the economy in these post-apartheid years. Under Mandela, South Africa opted for fiscal orthodoxy in its macroeconomic strategy. It adhered to the so-called Washington Consensus, deficit reduction, deregulation and privatisation. The abolition of some tariffs and subsidies, a generally conservative approach. And under this, in agriculture, mining and manufacture, large numbers of low skilled workers were laid off. By the year 2000, there were almost 1 million fewer people employed in the formal sector than there had been in 1990.
Unemployment rates continued to rise. And then from 2001, under President Thabo Mbeki, the government retreated from these rigorous limits. It increased state spending on infrastructure and on social welfare, and between 2004 and 2008, GDP, gross domestic product, grew at a healthy average of over 5% a year. But this trajectory was interrupted by the national international banking crisis of 2008. And South Africa recovered modestly and slowly from that crisis and has began to fall behind other emerging markets. The years 2016 and 2017 were difficult economically as they were politically under the contentious presidency of Jacob Zuma. I should be discussing Zuma’s presidency next week at this time. Details of large scale corruption and the shocking mismanagement of state resources, frightened of foreign investors. Credit rating agencies demoted South Africa’s credit rating to junk status and agriculture suffered from the most severe drought in a hundred years. 2018, Zuma was succeeded by Cyril Ramaphosa and hopes began to blossom of an economic recovery. But any prospects that Ramaphosa could halt decline or promote growth were cruelly dashed by the covid crisis in 2020 and 2021. Gross domestic product contracted by an alarming 6%. And in South Africa, as in other countries, covid wrought a particular toll upon the poor. South Africa recovered pre-pandemic levels two years ago, but the recovery have been both feeble and fragile.
Some of the persistent features that slowed down South Africa’s economy includes severe electricity shortages and outages, load shedding in South Africa speak, and also by logistic and transport bottlenecks, by the rising levels of state indebtedness, by inflation and by corruption. Now, against that backdrop, let me focus on poverty and inequality. The first point I want to make is that there have been modest but real advances in combating poverty, and the crucial policy weapon in achieving this was a rapid expansion of welfare provision, especially after 2003, in the form of pensions and social grants. There are now childcare grants, disability grants, and others. And in 1994, about two and a half million people received pensions and or grants, by 2018, this had risen to nearly 19 million people receiving cash transfers every month. This is one of the largest social assistance programmes in the world, and the ANC has been spending between 3 ½ and 4% of its GDP on social grants, and amongst major countries in the global south, its programme is unmatched, either in terms of expenditure or coverage. The system of mass transfers has worked. They have ameliorated ultra poverty or destitution. The proportion of adults living in the very lowest of 10 categories of living standards fell from 11% in 2001 to 1% in 2011. Pensions and grants, the income of the poorest 40% of the population would’ve been 3.3%. The income of the bottom 40% of the population would’ve been 3.3% without pensions and grants. With pensions and grants, it rose to 7.6%.
So a very significant increase achieved through or for the poorest people through pensions and grants. And despite this success story, there are forms of poverty that the social grant system simply doesn’t address. South Africa’s social security net has been flung wide, but it has a very loose weave because large numbers of people receive no social assistance at all. And in particular, the long-term unemployed receive virtually no financial support from the state or from private schemes, so that young men are almost entirely excluded from the system of social grants. Other category excluded from assistance, is unemployed women of working age who have no children. So for many young men and women, it is more feasible to live with parents or grandparents than to seek for non-existent jobs. And perversely in many households, it is the disabled, the sick, and the elderly who generate income through their grants and not young men and women in the prime of their lives. Perhaps it’s not so much a loosely woven net as one with a great jagged hole at its centre. Other ways in which the conditions of the poor improved have been through the provision of housing, clean water, improved sanitation and other services. And I can say more about that if there are questions later. But I want to turn now more specifically inequality. When it comes to inequality in contradistinction to poverty, where there’s been some success in reduction, the post apartheid story is as striking as it is dismaying. South Africa has become a more unequal society since 1994, not a more equal.
The most widely used index of inequality is the so-called Gini coefficient, G-I-N-I, where a Gini coefficient of naught would represent perfect equality, where every single person had the equal income. And a Gini coefficient of one would be absolute inequality, where one person receives all the income and everyone else receives nothing. But using this measure, we can see, and can we have the second slide please? Sorry, the one, not that one, previous one. Should be a third one. That’s the one. The red line on top is South Africa on the Gini coefficient, and the dotted blue line at the bottom, once again is an average for emerging markets. And if you can see here, from 2000, it starts in 1993 with a Gini coefficient just under 6%, that rises to a peak by about 2006, and it stayed there. This goes as far as 2017. In fact, it is now very, very nearly 0.7%, The Gini coefficient in South Africa, very high and much, much an outlier compared with other emerging markets. But why? Why is inequality, we can remove that slide please, why has inequality risen in this way? Two factors have caused inequality to rise. They are, firstly, an increasing concentration of income and wealth, more concentrated income and wealth. And then secondly, a particularly sharp rise of inequality within the African population. Let me take the first of those. That’s the concentration one. It puts one in mind of the biblical text, “To everyone who has, more will be given and he will have abundance. But from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away.” In 1993, the wealthiest decile, that’s the wealthiest top percent, 10%, in terms of wealth of the population, the top 10% accounted for 54% of the country’s income. By 2008, their share had swelled to over 58%.
The poorest 50% of the population saw its share fall from eight and a half to seven and a half percent. Perhaps we can have the final slide please? This shows the skewing of income towards the richest 20%. I’ve been talking about the 10%, but this is looking at the, from the fourth here, to the fifth, the top 20%. Now that’s income, showing almost 70% of the income in that top 20%. But if you move from income to wealth, parity is even sharper. By wealth, I mean inherited wealth, money in equities and stocks and shares, property, interest on saving, rents, capital gains, wealth as opposed to income or salaries. And on that measure, wealth in South Africa sees the top 10%, own about 85% of all assets. Top 10% owns 85%, but that’s not even the most striking feature. The top 1%, the top 1% of the population owns about 25% of the wealth. The top 0.1%, not 1%, not 0.1%, but 0.01%, about 35,000 people own 15% of all the wealth in South Africa. So you can see extreme disparities in wealth concentration, skewing inequality in this way. You can remove that slide. Thank you. And then the second driver of inequality has been a dramatic growth of inequality amongst the African population, which comprises just over 80% of the total population. Inequality between the four main population groups has diminished slightly, but this is because of what has happened within the African population, today, the most unequal of the poor population groups. I mentioned that top decile of the population, which owns about 60% of national income, today, half of its members are African, half of the top 10% in wealth are African.
An African middle class has grown very fast, accelerated by state employment, by movement into managerial and professional posts opened up by the end of apartheid, and by the hot house growth of an entrepreneurial elite through black economic empowerment, a set of policies known as BEE or black economic empowerment. In 2006, the Merrill Lynch World Wealth Report identified 5,580 new dollar millionaires in South Africa in one year, and this was the highest per capita rate of increase in the world. There are now about 250,000 Africans in an upper class of high earners, up from about 19,000 in 1993, and about 5.4 million Africans in a middle class. The evidence is unequivocal, in post apartheid South Africa, affluence has been de-racialized while poverty remains strongly racialized, visited with particular severity upon Africans, at the bottom of the economic pecking order as they were under apartheid. Not all Africans remain poor, but the great majority of the poor remain African. Inequality within the African population has increased so sharply, that it’s the most important single driver of the overall measure of inequality since 1994. In 1993, somebody called Mike Morris warned presciently of a 50% solution. And I’m just going to quote a couple of sentences.
“Powerful forces are leading us towards a new two nations society, a 50% solution that will allow some South Africans to embrace opportunity and privilege, but banish the rest to the margins.” And today, indeed, a well to do multiracial, upper and middle class inhabits the different physical, social, and ideological space from a dirt-poor, black lumpenproletariat and an army of the unemployed. “Inequality is not simply a measure of unfairness. There’s consensus in the economic literature on inequality that extremely high levels of inequality are detrimental to a country’s development and stifle a country’s potential. They threaten the social fabric of society, they increase the risks of political and economic upheaval, and they prevent the majority of people from living up to their full potential.” So what is to be done? In South Africa as elsewhere, addressing inequality will require steps that are redistributive. As a group of South African economists notes dryly, “Tackling inequality is a more complicated and politically contentious affair than tackling poverty, as the former, tackling inequality, implies a rearrangement of the positions of the poor and the rich.” This is not a new idea. 50 years ago, RH Titmuss, the great British theorist of social welfare, spelled out the implications differentiating between poverty and inequality. To recognise inequality as the problem involves recognising the need for structural change, for sacrifices. I’m going to start again, sorry. It’s an important sentence.
“To recognise inequality as the problem involves recognising the need for structural change, for sacrifices by the majority. It involves categories of social welfare we’ve hither to disapproved of. In short, it means a painful war.” Such measures, redistributive measures, at the very least, would include a more progressive tax structure and what is called a wealth tax. It would see lifetime capital receipts taxed on inherited wealth and it would have a realistic property tax based upon up to date assessment. It will also be imperative to reduce corruption and increase accountability. These are fairly obvious steps, but they require political will. Actions needing political will and a social imagination might include a basic income grant, the expansion of social protection so as to provide some relief to unemployed adults. It might include systematic job creation on large scale infrastructural projects, and it might include curbing the huge sums spirited out of the country each year by the financial and industrial giants. Make no mistake, these would require a series of battles in Titmuss’s painful war. Fighting for such changes might, well, if they know something of the history of inequality in South Africa, declare it a just war. Other words to conclude. To reduce poverty and inequality meaningfully, requires a political solution, not a technical one. In South Africa, this would mean a realignment of political forces that would make possible a fundamental realignment of policies. It would pose a challenge to an ANC government so deeply implicated in the status quo and so reluctant to seek structural solutions to structural problems. It would require re mobilisation of the citizenry, pressure from below on politicians, and the deepening of democracy. Thank you very much. I’m going to go quickly to the questions here.
Q&A and Comments:
Q: Do my statistics include immigrants, refugees from other parts of Africa?
A: I’m afraid I don’t know the answer to that. I’ll have to go back to Stats South Africa and check.
Q: Where does the income, Zoom User asks, “Where does the income come from of the African millionaires? Types of occupations, professions or?”
A: And I think there’s a question mark. They typically come from access, through black economic empowerment to the boardroom. Cyril Ramaphosa is a very good example. Ramaphosa left politics for business in 1997. He became, he was eagerly sought after for his personal skills and experience and he became a director of a number of companies. He began to invest widely and became a Rand billionaire, and that’s been the main route, rather than entrepreneurial, it’s been people getting wealthy in the service and financial sector through black economic empowerment. There are of course successful entrepreneurs and and so on, but the overall, the income has come from a policy designed to grow, in kind of hothouse conditions, an African economic elite.
Q: I’m asked by iPhone 11, “To what extent is the current economic condition of South Africa due to corruption and mismanagement? How have the trend lines for poverty and equality changed from 1990 to date? How can the collapse of the South African Airways, Eskom?” And I think that should be SARS, “South African Revenue Service be explained?”
A: I don’t want to duck this question, but I am speaking next Monday on Jacob Zuma and the state capture saga, and I’ll be addressing those answers in more detail, but to an extent that’s difficult to measure. The current economic condition of South Africa has been worsened, not caused, but worsened by corruption and mismanagement. And the collapse of the state owned enterprises like the airways, the railways, the electricity generators, et cetera, can be explained by this phenomenon that next week I’ll be discussing under state capture. The hollowing out of those state enterprises for private gain.
Then how have the trend lines for poverty and inequality changed from 1990 to date? In a nutshell, poverty remains high, but it’s not as high as it was in 1994. Inequality has risen and is currently higher than it was in 94, and I did try to address those to some extent in my lecture, Phumi Mashego asks, there’s a delineation of the population to include people who were originally mixed race and descendants of European settlers and indigenous black Africans. The racial classifications in apartheid South Africa were black or Africans, Indians, Coloureds and white.
I’m not sure if that’s a question though, Margaret’s asking, and sorry, I didn’t notice that, and Phumi has replied to her. Yes, Coloureds include descendants of slaves, who are largely are Muslims, sometimes called the Cape Malays, but also descendants of relationships between people across the so-called racial groups.
Q: Auntie Golden asked, “Was I involved in the side of South Africa in the genocide case?”
A: No, I had nothing to do with the case whatsoever.
Q: Barry Epstein, “Who is to blame for this? Is it because of corruption or simply mismanagement?”
A: To blame for poverty and inequality? To a very, very significant extent, Barry, if I’ve argued anything this evening, it’s been that not making blame as a moral category, but blame as explanation, where does this level of poverty and inequality derive from? It derives from history, it’s historically constructed, and then what happened is that inherited levels of poverty and inequality have been handled not particularly well post apartheid. So that would be my answer there.
Q: I’m asked Alfred, “Since a political solution is required and it’s in the best interests of politicians to keep the populace ignorant, how is it possible to improve education and the employability of the deprived sectors?”
A: That’s a key question. I believe, as the lecturer earlier today said that perhaps the single blackest mark against the ANC government that’s been in power for 30 years is that 30 years into post apartheid, public schools are still failing institutions. Africans are still receiving, the majority of Africans receiving deficient education, and until that improves, it’s going to take decades if not generations to equalise life opportunities.
I’ve answered Monte Golden’s question.
Susan, thank you.
And Barbara also asking about corruption and state capture. I think I’ve answered that. Requires a complete structuring of more just governance and restructuring of the economic model of capitalism. I think I’m agreeing with that. I’m talking about a more redistributive form. I’ve managed to answer all the questions that have come in. Oh, at the bottom.
Thank you Rita.
Q: Harriet, I won’t go into South African, Israeli relations this evening, if you don’t mind, Barry asks, “Are wealthy blacks charitable? Do they help poor blacks?”
A: Yes, there are a number of black foundations have been founded, but I think the most distinctive way in which wealthier blacks help poorer blacks is through the extended family and very, very strong sense of responsibility towards other family members. That in itself is partly an explanation of pressures that middle class, I’m not talking about the wealthiest, but middle class state employees are under, providing for poorer members of their families, poorer strains of the families, makes them perhaps more susceptible to corruption.
Q: What are my thoughts about the union movement and jobs?
A: It’s a failing trade union movement at the moment. It’s losing members and its main majority of members are public sector workers. Malema and nationalisation. Again, I’ll pick up on that next week.
Again, Michael Blocker. No idea whatsoever, I’ve no answer to that.
Thank you all very much for your questions and my apology again for a late beginning. Thank you.