Langa lokulunga 🌞🌞

You almost got it, but you stopped short. Let me help you. Anyone who has ever put money into a savings account understands compound interest. You put a little cash away, it earns interest, and then that interest earns its own interest, and so on and so forth, and things of that nature. You leave it long enough and those small amounts become a little fortune. Nobody finds this controversial. Yet the moment you apply the same logic to the origins of persistent inequality, people suddenly lose their minds and their basic understanding of maths. So let’s do the maths. Across some 350 years of colonialism and apartheid, racial exclusion took different forms, but its effects accumulated. One generation’s advantage became the next generation’s inheritance. One generation’s exclusion became the next generation’s obstacle. Let’s take education. Verwoerd put it very bluntly: “There is no place for.. the Bantu… in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour.” Education was being shaped by a government that had already decided how far you should be allowed to rise. One group had access to training, universities and skilled work. The other faced inferior schooling, restricted access to universities and laws reserving categories of skilled jobs for whites. And when it came to schooling, the state spent vastly more on white children. In 1971/72, expenditure per white pupil was more than eighteen times expenditure per Black pupil. Eighteen times. That has consequences to this very day. Meanwhile, on the other side, the interest kept accruing: the house paid off, the farm handed down, the business inherited, the uncle who knows the managing director. You inherit more than money. You inherit what money and access makes possible. Then, in 1994, the race was opened, and we were expected to behave as though everyone was standing on the same starting block. Having said that, the new dispensation has scored many, many own goals. We could be in a much better position, and I place much of the blame on a very specific era. Recognising what apartheid did does not require us to excuse what subsequent governments have done. Under Mbeki, economic growth averaged about 4.2% between 2000 and 2007. At that rate, an economy doubles in roughly seventeen years. Had we sustained it after 2008, our economy would have been about twice its 2008 size by 2025. And there were jobs. In his 2007 Budget Speech, Trevor Manuel said that the economy was creating about 500 000 jobs a year. Yes, BEE and all. We can’t ignore the global financial crisis of course (but we were largely insulated because of measures that had put in place). Most crucially, we cannot explain every failure since 1994 by pointing backwards. Equally, we cannot explain today’s inequality by pretending that history began in 1994. So yes, there have been own goals. Far too many. And when the economy stops working for people, we start pointing fingers at one another instead of confronting what keeps us here. We retreat into our narrow-minded laagers while the problems outside keep growing. We understood compound interest at the beginning of this conversation. Surely we can also understand that every year we fail to fix these problems, their consequences compound too.