World Bank report on SA being the most unequal nation on earth is an indictment of our policy and decision-makers
10 March 2022
The Congress of South African Trade Unions has noted the Word Bank report highlighting South Africa as the world’s most unequal society in the world. Our policymakers should be embarrassed for sticking with policies that have kept the apartheid-designed policy of separate development alive.
What is more surprising is that despite these figures, there are many “leaders” who are still arguing that what we need to solve this economic mess is more neoliberalism and not less of it. Our policymakers spend most of their time explaining away poverty as a thing unconnected with the capitalist system and pretending as if capitalism is a natural phenomenon that cannot be changed.
Two years ago, in 2019, Oxfam released its inequality report that showed that the rich were getting richer, while the poor were getting poorer. This latest World Bank report is just another reminder of the inequities of a system that condemns hundreds of millions of human beings to lives of brute survival and exposes the hypocrisies of those who benefit from this situation.
Currently, there is no real commitment to accelerating shared economic growth and transforming the structures of production and ownership by the ANC-led government.