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Thursday, July 24, 2025

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Is Mandela's economic legacy positive?

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20131214

While there is no doubt that for­mer South African Pres­i­dent Nel­son Man­dela, who died last week at the age of 95, is de­serv­ing of every ac­co­lade that has been be­stowed on him, there is some analy­sis in the in­ter­na­tion­al me­dia which ar­gues that his eco­nom­ic lega­cy may not be en­tire­ly pos­i­tive.

Near­ly 20 years af­ter the per­ni­cious sys­tem of apartheid was scrapped, ques­tions are be­ing asked about the ex­tent of the eco­nom­ic and fi­nan­cial progress made by South Africa's ma­jor­i­ty eth­nic group, which com­pris­es 79 per cent of the coun­try's pop­u­la­tion of 53 mil­lion peo­ple. Put an­oth­er way, it is be­ing not­ed that those who pros­pered the most from the apartheid sys­tem–the eth­nic group that makes up 8.9 per cent of the coun­try's pop­u­la­tion–con­tin­ue to pros­per fab­u­lous­ly af­ter 19 years of post-apartheid, ma­jor­i­ty rule.

Mean­while, the lives of most of those mem­bers of the ma­jor­i­ty group–who were en­ti­tled to ex­pect that the end of apartheid would have brought them div­i­dends in terms of sig­nif­i­cant and mea­sur­able im­prove­ments in the qual­i­ty of their lives–re­main nasty, brutish and short. Much of the re­port­ing on the South African econ­o­my em­pha­sizes the fact that the un­em­ploy­ment rate re­mains very high, while the dif­fer­ence be­tween the in­comes en­joyed by the eth­nic ma­jor­i­ty and mi­nor­i­ty re­mains as skewed as un­der apartheid: It is es­ti­mat­ed that on av­er­age a mi­nor­i­ty house­hold earns six times as much as a ma­jor­i­ty one


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