BUSINESS NEWS
Income gap 'will lead to uprising'
Posted Fri, 14 Oct 2005
South Africa's rich and poor were drifting in opposite directions, creating tension that would lead to a popular uprising, an academic told a Black Management Forum (BMF) meeting in Johannesburg on Thursday.
"The question is when it will happen and what will be its intensity," Stellenbosch University emeritus professor Sampie Terreblanche said.
Proof of this growing tension gap was the fact that South Africa's per capita income made it the 52nd-ranked country in the world. Its human development index had however fallen from 85th place in 1990 to 120th in 2004.
Terreblanche said South Africa's history showed that the arrogance and short-sightedness of first the English and then the Afrikaner middle class had led to their downfall. The black middle class would meet the same fate at the hands of poor blacks, he said.
English middle class exploitation of poor Afrikaners led to the rise of Afrikaner nationalism in 1934. The National Party helped bring
about the rise of the Afrikaner middle class by increasing social spending on them.
"By the mid-1970s the Afrikaners demonstrated all the characteristics of a new rich middle class — greedy, arrogant and eventually stupid."
This class then had a tendency of claiming that its privileged position was the result of its own hard work.
"Most of the middle class are in a privileged position due to lucky breaks during their own or their parents' lives," he argued.
The black middle class was in its fortunate position due to the ANC-led government and black economic empowerment policy, Terreblanche said. He said the new black middle class was "conspicuously indifferent" to the impoverished. It was not possible to do anything meaningful about the so-called impoverished "second economy" without the full cooperation and sacrifice of the first.
To laughter and applause he said a shift in mindset was required for the middle class to relinquish its
"greediness, arrogance, short-termism and stupidity".
Both economies needed to be transformed into a development state to alleviate the unequal power relationship between them.
"The vested interest of the South African middle class in the glory of their own status is too strong," he said. What also halted progress was the South African public sector's lack of capacity.
He pointed to the government's failure to acknowledge that social conditions were worsening in the country as the reason why 50 percent of the population had slid deeper into poverty over the last 30 years.
"I don't think we can reach a six percent growth rate. But even if we can there is not going to be a sufficient and long-term trickle-down effect needed to transform both economies into a development state," he said.
"The real issue of the middle class is the apathy that does not allow them to look beyond their own self interest," said chairperson of Stanlib and Andisa
capital, Saki Macozoma.
He said the South African government had not responded to structural changes in the country's and the world's economy.
The growing service sector required better language skills, a demand for which "key social institutions" had not responded adequately, Macozoma said.
Sapa
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