Socialist Banner have often highlighted [ the last occasion being here ] the failure of the ending of apartheid to significantly improve the lives of the majority of South Africans and also the failure of the South African working people to use their newly acquired political rights to fundamentally change their society . We now read that the number of South Africans living on less than $1 a day has more than doubled in a decade since shortly after the end of apartheid.
The South African Institute of Race Relations survey said 4.2 million people were living on $1 a day in 2005. This is up from 1.9 million in 1996, two years after the first all-race elections. SAIRR says poverty is also increasing among the white population while inequality was growing among the black population.
"Poverty has increased both in absolute numbers and proportionally," SAIRR said in a statement .
"It is going to take a long time to get rid of the poverty," said SAIRR researcher Marius Roodt.
The author of the Accelerated & Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa , a government-backed report on unemployment released last month , put it: "Poverty is something that we are likely to see in South Africa for many generations."
Socialist Banner has said in the past that the ANC only ever promised to be a party that could run South African capitalism better than a white-controlled government, neglecting to tell the exploited masses, that it is the capitalist system that controls governments, not vice versa.
Whichever way the African working class voted one thing was certain, they were only ever acquiescing in their own future exploitation.
Commentary and analysis to persuade people to become socialist and to act for themselves, organizing democratically and without leaders, to bring about a world of common ownership and free access. We are solely concerned with building a movement of socialists for socialism. We are not reformists with a programme of policies to patch up capitalism.
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As for internationalism and pan-africanism . A Zimbabwean job-seeker has died of starvation in Cape Town . He collapsed and died of hunger close to the Home Affairs Refugee Centre where he had been trying to get a temporary asylum permit to enable him to live and work in Cape Town. Like many desperate Zimbabweans, Mr Musati had reportedly been sleeping in a cardboard box near the centre for a whole month during which he had been trying to get the permit.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/article3155085.ece
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