10 percent of earners in South Africa take away 101 times the earnings of the bottom 10 percent of the population. The gap between the rich and poor people in South Africa is fast increasing and poor people are fed up that they live in deep poverty yet the bosses for whom they work live in luxury. Recent reports have shown that Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) of most of these large mining firms like Anglo Platinum and Goldfields earn in the excess of R20million a year yet their workers receive meagre wages and the social conditions that they live in resemble a squatter camp.
Unemployment rate is currently at 25 percent
Unemployment rate is currently at 25 percent
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More of the same is predicted for 2013 & beyond:
Zuma came to power in 2009 under a cloud. For years he had faced charges of corruption, racketeering, money laundering and fraud, only for them to be dropped weeks before he took power. Today he faces another scandal: the state spending of what the South African press say is $28 million on security upgrades at his private residence in his home province of Kwazulu-Natal. Those allegations — and hundreds of other accusations of corruption and criminality against ANC ministers and councillors — fixate the media. But it is the ANC’s failure to lift its natural constituency — the half of the country, according to the government’s own figures, that 18 years after the end of apartheid still live below the poverty line — which this year stirred violent and angry mass protests against it. The state’s brutal opposition to those demonstrations, which included police shooting dead 34 striking miners at a platinum mine at Marikana in the north of the country in August, was both shocking in the manner it evoked the violence of apartheid and underscored the distance that now exists between South Africa’s poor and the party that promised to liberate them. The election of Cyril Ramaphosa with a similar margin as Zuma’s deputy on Tuesday is further testament to how blind the ANC now is to popular sentiment. Ramaphosa was a target of particular fury at Marikana: he is a former leader of the National Union of Mineworkers who went on to use his political connections to become one of South Africa’s richest men, in part owing to his stake in Marikana’s mine owners, Lonmin. An official inquiry into the massacre heard how the day before the shooting, Ramaphosa wrote to Lonmin’s chief commercial officer saying: “The terrible events that have unfolded cannot be described as a labor dispute. They are plainly dastardly criminal and must be characterized as such … there needs to be concomitant action to address this situation.”
http://tinyurl.com/c25r6on
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