unemployment

The first time I went to Khayelitsha was on a Sunday afternoon. I had spent the day lazing around, when a friend called to say he was going there to drop somebody off and asked if I wanted to tag along. In a heartbeat I said yes; it had been almost three years since I moved to Cape Town, and I had never been to this township that I had heard so much about. I decided not to have any expectations, but to rather let my experience determine my views of the many good, bad, amusing and appalling stories I had been told about Khayelitsha.

South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world. It is often said to be the most unequal, but that is incorrect. A number of countries, for example Namibia and Seychelles, have higher gini coefficients (the measure most often used to measure income distribution) than does South Africa¹. There are a number of other countries that are clearly very unequal - some major oil producers for example - but, for obvious reasons, choose not to measure the extent of their inequality.
 

On 22 June 2014, four suspected illegal miners were found dead with gunshot wounds to the head at a gold mine near Johannesburg. Earlier this year (2014), a rescue operation to remove illegal miners from the abandoned Gold One mineshaft in the East Rand, Gauteng, revealed a reluctance to be rescued for fear of arrest. This brings to attention the scale and intractability of efforts to curb illegal mining.

Do we live in a world where powerful men in government, powerful men in business and powerful men in army uniforms conspire to smash popular dissent to the growing inequality?

When the Forbes magazine - not the representative of the world's poor - quotes an Oxfam report, released at the World Economic Forum (WEF) Davos meeting this year, that raises the obscenity of inequality - then it is time the world’s rich and powerful stand up and answer some serious questions.