With its gleaming high-rises and lush estates, Sandton is known as Africa’s richest square mile. Alexandra, a onetime home to Nelson Mandela, is a squalid, cramped and crime-infested black township. Many of its residents stream into Sandton every day on a bridge over a highway to work in upscale shops or homes.
Angry protests flared in Alexandra last month, stoked in part by campaigning for Wednesday’s national election but mostly by the frustration that South Africa should look far different than the country of haves and have-nots that it has become. Many voters believe the ruling African National Congress has lost its way since Mandela won the first post-apartheid presidential election in 1994, and that belief threatens the ANC’s absolute majority grip on power.
The ANC has been shaken by widespread allegations of corruption that saw former President Jacob Zuma forced out a year ago, and many South Africans feel the party can no longer coast on its legacy of fighting the brutal system of apartheid.
Unemployment in the country of 56 million people soars past 25 percent. There are tire-burning protests almost every day over the lack of basic services like working toilets in mostly black neighborhoods. Whites still hold much of the wealth and private levers of power, while blacks trim their lawns and clean their homes.
“We find virtually no whites living below the middle class,” Fazila Farouk and Murray Leibbrandt with the Southern Africa Labor and Development Research Unit wrote last year. “Whites have, in fact, comfortably improved their economic status in post-apartheid South Africa because our economy channels such a big share of national income to the top 10 percent.”
Half of South Africans are in households with per capita income of 1,149 rand ($90) or less a month, they wrote, with little chance to change their fortunes despite working hard as maids or security guards.
“Put bluntly, they’re stuck,” Farouk and Leibbrandt concluded. ContinueReading
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