South Africa's Huge Social Problems

A special report on South Africa
The great scourges
A black middle class is emerging, but poverty and crime blight millions of lives

Jun 3rd 2010 | From The Economist print edition

TEBOGO, aged 25, is a security guard in Johannesburg, earning just 11.38 rand an hour. Improperly classified as “self-employed”, he gets no paid holiday, sick leave or other benefits. By dint of working a 12-hour day, 25 days a month, he manages to earn 3,400 rand a month. Out of this he has to pay 250 rand rent to a friend who allows him to live in a one-room shack in his yard, next to seven others. Their 15 occupants share a single pit-latrine and outside water tap. Tebogo pays his employer 390 rand a month for transport and 98 rand for the uniform he is obliged to wear. Another 350 rand a month goes on maintenance for his six-year-old daughter. He also gives about 800 rand a month to his parents, who have no other source of income. In a good month that leaves Tebogo with about 1,500 rand for himself and his studies. He would like to become a radio journalist one day.

Lindiwe is a 58-year-old cleaner for a block of offices. For an eight-hour day, five days a week, she earns a basic 1,500 rand a month, which tips bring up to 2,100 rand That has to keep her, her unemployed husband and two grandchildren whom she looks after. Having inherited her parents’ home, she pays no rent, but spends around 55 rand a month on electricity, 30 rand on water and 300 rand a month on her one-hour bus journey to work. During apartheid, she used to work as a domestic servant for a white family, living in a one-room shack at the bottom of the garden and working 13 hours a day, seven days a week. On her one weekend off a month she would try to visit her two children who were being brought up by her mother in Soweto, a sprawling black township south of Johannesburg.

Tebogo and Lindiwe are poor, but at least they have a regular job; many don’t. In 2008 three-quarters of South Africans had incomes below 50,000 rand a year. Of these, 83% were black (who make up 75% of the workforce) and just 6.5% white (13% of the workforce). Only 0.6% of South Africans earned over 750,000 rand, of whom three-quarters were white and 16% (or about 30,000 individuals) black (see table 3). A further 265,000 blacks were earning 300,000-750,000 rand, and 1.6m were getting 100,000-300,000. That means nearly 2m black individuals (and probably three times as many if immediate family members are included) are now members of the newly emerging black middle class. Like their white counterparts, these so-called “black diamonds” tend to live in secure gated communities, send their children to private schools, take out private health insurance, work out in air-conditioned gyms, dine in fancy restaurants and buy expensive cars. It is at this level that most racial mixing and a few interracial marriages take place.

Thanks to a massive increase in welfare spending, millions have been lifted out of the worst poverty. Since 1996 average black income per person has more than tripled in real terms, to nearly 20,000 rand. But average white income per person over the same period has risen almost as fast, to 136,000 rand ...More

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