On Talibés and Almajirai

The talibés in Senegal and almajirai (plural of almajiri) in Nigeria are remarkably similar. Both groups consist of young boys sent away from their rural families to live in urban residential Islamic schools, where traditional practices have increasingly devolved into systemic street begging and child exploitation.

Both are rooted in traditional Islamic boarding systems—called daaras in Senegal and tsangaya or almajiri schools in Northern Nigeria—where students focus intensely on memorising the Quran under a religious teacher (maramu or mallam).

Parents typically send their young sons (often starting at age 4 to 7) away from impoverished countryside villages to major cities, trusting they will receive a pious religious upbringing. Rather than being fully provided for by their teachers or communities, many of these children are mandated to spend hours each day roaming the streets to meet daily quotas for money or food.

International bodies and NGOs classify the systemic neglect, lack of formal secular education, malnutrition, and forced labour surrounding both groups as severe child protection and welfare crises.

The systems of both the Talibés in Senegal and the Almajirai in Nigeria began as highly respected, community-supported networks for higher Islamic education. Over centuries, economic pressures, colonisation, and rapid urbanisation transformed them from prestigious academic traditions into the marginalised systems seen today.

The Almajiri System in Nigeria, Pre-Colonial Prestige: The word almajiri comes from the Arabic al-Muhajirun, meaning "the emigrant." It historically referred to students who travelled to gain knowledge. In the pre-colonial Kanem-Bornu Empire and Sokoto Caliphate, these schools were elite institutions. They produced the region’s judges, clerks, and scholars. The traditional schools (tsangaya) were heavily subsidised by the ruling emirs, wealthy patrons, and the local community through zakat (charitable giving). Students did not need to beg because the community willingly fed and clothed them as a religious duty.

The British Disruption: In 1904, the British colonial administration conquered Northern Nigeria. They abolished state funding for Islamic schools and refused to recognise them legally. At the same time, they introduced a Western-style secular school system that required fees, which most poor Muslim families rejected. Deprived of state financial support, teachers (mallams) and their students lost their livelihoods. To survive, schools migrated to urban commercial centres, and students were forced to work or beg for food and charity, transforming a system of prestigious scholarship into a survival mechanism.

The Talibé System in Senegal, Pre-Colonial Integration: In Senegal, traditional Islamic schools (daaras) were deeply integrated into rural agrarian societies. Young boys (talibés, from the Arabic talib, meaning "student") studied the Quran under a religious teacher (marabout). Historically, talibés did not beg for money on city streets. Instead, they worked alongside their marabout on communal agricultural land, growing food to feed the school. This labour was viewed as character-building, teaching the boys humility, discipline, and the value of hard work.

The French colonial administration in Senegal marginalised traditional daaras, choosing to fund and promote French secular schools instead. This isolated the Islamic schools economically, restricting them to rural areas. During the 1970s and 1980s, severe droughts devastated West African agriculture, making rural farming unsustainable. Desperate marabouts moved their daaras into large cities like Dakar to survive. Lacking land to farm and unable to afford city life, the teachers adapted the traditional labour model, sending children onto urban streets to beg for daily cash and food quotas.

Equivalent systems and student populations are found in Niger, Chad, Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, Togo, Ghana, and Côte d'Ivoire.

While colonial education policies are a major historical catalyst, they are not the sole ultimate cause for the widespread street begging associated with almajirai (in Nigeria) and talibés (in Senegal/West Africa). Widespread rural poverty leads many families to send children away to daaras or tsangaya schools because they cannot afford to feed them at home. In addition, secular post-colonial governments often failed to integrate or properly regulate traditional religious schools, leaving a legal vacuum where abusive teachers can exploit children for economic gain. What was historically a minor or non-systemic practice of enduring hardship or seeking alms has morphed in urban environments into commercialised, forced begging managed by exploitative networks.

Both Senegal and Nigeria have introduced several legal reforms, modern curriculum integrations, and bans on street begging to address these crises. However, enforcing these laws remains incredibly difficult due to political pressure, deep-rooted cultural traditions, and severe enforcement gaps. In Nigeria particularly, the federal government launched major initiatives to build "Model Islamic Schools" (Tsangaya schools). These schools fuse traditional Quranic memorisation with basic English, mathematics, and vocational training, funded by the state, to eliminate the financial need for begging. But neither government has the budget or infrastructure to house, feed, and formally educate the millions of children who rely on these systems for shelter. Also, many rural, conservative parents still distrust state-run secular schools, viewing them as elite institutions that do not teach moral values.

In Northern Nigeria, the almajiri system is deeply scrutinised as a critical national security concern. Security analysts and organisations like the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT) highlight how the system functions as a vulnerability pipeline. With an estimated 30 million out-of-school and almajiri children in Nigeria, violent non-state actors like Boko Haram, ISWAP (Islamic State West Africa Province), and northern bandit groups look to these children as prime recruitment pools.

While the system itself does not inherently teach violent extremism, it produces hundreds of thousands of boys who grow up experiencing severe poverty, isolation, and a lack of parental love or state support. When they outgrow the schools, they often have no secular education, no literacy, or job skills, leaving them economically desperate and susceptible to the financial and ideological promises of insurgent groups.

Also, because almajiri children are highly visible begging on city streets, they face intense societal stigmatisation, sometimes being pejoratively labelled by the public as "urchins" or future criminals. This social exclusion deepens their detachment from the state, making anti-government insurgent narratives more appealing.

Ref: Exploring Youth Radicalisation Within the Almajiri System in Northern Nigeria

Talibés beg in Senegal's St Louis's main market. The boys can spend up to 10 hours on the streets in search of food and money, with severe beatings awaiting some. Photo by Pete Pattison/The Guardian

On the Mangroves of the Niger Delta

Key Facts About the Niger Delta Mangroves

It covers roughly 6,000 to 7,000 square kilometers (around 60% of Nigeria's total mangrove areas). It is the single largest mangrove ecosystem on the African continent. It is heavily impacted by decades of industrial logging, invasive species, and extensive oil and gas spills.

The flora of the Niger Delta is dominated by red, white, and black mangrove trees, alongside the invasive Nypa palm, while its wildlife includes specialised species such as mudskippers, West African manatees, Sclater's guenons, and fiddler crabs.

There are many environmental threats to the mangrove forests in the Niger Delta.

Oil extraction is the largest threat to Nigeria's mangrove forests. The oil-rich Niger Delta produces up to two million barrels of crude oil a day, which has placed Nigeria as the 9th oil producing country in the world. Such extensive oil extraction has come at great environmental and social cost. Nigeria's Federal Ministry of Environment has estimated that since 1958, 13 million barrels of oil have been spilled during extraction processes. 

Activities such as oil drilling, spillage, dredging of canals, and the construction of housing for oil workers pose substantial threats to the survival and effective functioning of the mangrove ecosystem. Oil spills and leakages have inflicted significant damage on Nigeria's mangrove areas, affecting not only the mangroves themselves but also the fishing economy and overall water quality.

Another threat to the mangroves is infrastructure development. This stands as a primary factor driving mangrove deforestation in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. In recent times, particularly with the establishment of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) after extensive years of advocating against the marginalisation of this region (where Nigeria's primary crude oil reserves are located), endeavours to enhance infrastructure have been initiated. However, these initiatives occasionally lead to mangrove destruction. Land reclamation for residential and public infrastructure construction represents a significant danger to the mangrove ecosystem. 

Massive fish farming operations constitute a different significant factor contributing to the deforestation and degradation of mangroves in the region. An illustrative instance is evident in Buguma, Rivers State, where ONIDA, an Israeli company, engages in extensive fish farming. The establishment of this fish farm, boasting over forty ponds, resulted in the devastation and filling of a substantial area of the mangrove forest, crucial for the livelihoods of the local population. The primary motivation for situating the farm near the mangrove is to ensure a consistent supply of brackish (salty) water necessary for cultivating the targeted fish species, particularly the Barramundi, which is cultivated and imported from Australia. However, the overall contributions of such endeavours to the rural economy, considering the importation of nearly all farm necessities, including fish feed from Israel or Australia, raise significant questions.  

Nypa fruticans (Nipa palm) – an invasive alien species, is another major threat to the mangrove ecosystem in the Niger Delta. The species, which was introduced in Nigeria for the control of riverbank erosion has become a big menace to the mangrove ecosystem. The deforestation and degradation of the mangroves for firewood gathering, the construction of navigational canals, villages, and the activities of oil companies, encourage their replacement by this fast colonizer (Nypa fruticans) which does not provide the enormous ecological services provided by mangroves.

Also, improper waste disposal is an additional contributor to mangrove degradation in the Niger Delta. Instances of constructing public toilets that discharge waste directly into the mangroves and disposing of waste in their vicinity have become prevalent in the area.

As with most problems Nigeria currently faces, inadequate foresight planning and the country's large and ever increasing population rank as major contributing factors. 

The Niger Delta region is my ancestral homeland.

 

Nypa fruticans, commonly known as the nipa palm

The species is native to the Andaman Islands, Australia (Northern Territory and Queensland), Bangladesh, Bismarck Archipelago, Indonesia, Cambodia, Caroline Islands, China (Hainan), India, Java, Lesser Sunda Islands, Malaysia, Moluccas, Myanmar, Nansei-shoto, New Guinea, Nicobar Islands, Philippines, Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, Sulawesi, Sumatra, Thailand and Vietnam where it lives, sinking its roots in the mud, in mainly brackish waters along the coasts, lagoons and estuaries, flooded by sea water only for a short time, not surviving if permanently submerged. By the beginning of the 20th century, it has been introduced in Nigeria where it has rapidly diffused up to Cameroon becoming an invasive species and in some cases a pest.

A brief take on the impacts of European imperialism on Africa

European imperialism was the downfall of Africa. The continent and its people could have modernised in their own way, at their own pace, while retaining their own values, ideologies, value systems, and philosophies. The tragedy was in abandoning what was originally theirs, which had evolved organically over millennia, to embrace that which was foreign, European or Arabian. On this latter trajectory, the continent and its people were always going to struggle, in striving to become what they had not originally evolved to be.

Traditional African societies were generally well-ordered and well-organised, characterised by diverse, sophisticated systems of governance, economics, and social structure long before colonial intervention. While often falsely portrayed as primitive, these societies ranged from large, centralised empires (such as Mali, Songhai, and Great Zimbabwe) to decentralised "stateless" societies, all of which maintained social order through established customs, kinship, and, in many cases, complex administrative hierarchies.

Key aspects of order and organisation in traditional African society included:

Political Structure: Governance varied widely, from monarchies with divine kings to council-led systems that relied on consensus, such as the "interminable palaver" (discussions) mentioned by Julius Nyerere. Authority was often decentralised among lineage elders, age-sets, and clan leaders, with some areas operating as "ordered anarchies" based on strong social norms rather than rigid, coercive governments.

Social Order and Kinship: The core of social organisation was the extended family and clan, which provided social security, regulated land use, and defined moral behaviour. Respect for elders, community solidarity, and adherence to tradition were paramount in maintaining harmony.

Economic Organisation: Economies were organised around agriculture, animal husbandry, and trade. Complex systems were in place, such as the osusu (cooperative, rotating savings) and trade networks that stretched across the Sahara.

Justice and Administration: Many societies had sophisticated judicial mechanisms to resolve disputes, managed by councils of elders or, in some cases, centralised officials.

Cultural and Ethical Values: A common ethos of communalism—often summed up by the philosophy of "I am because we are"—guided daily life, ensuring that individual actions were aligned with the well-being of the collective."

AI has this to say, as a first response when queried about the impacts of European imperialism on Africa:

"European imperialism in Africa (roughly 1870s–1960s) caused profound, lasting devastation by exploiting resources, imposing arbitrary borders, and disrupting social systems. It resulted in widespread forced labour, violent atrocities (e.g., in the Congo), economic dependency, and cultural suppression, which created deeply ingrained cycles of poverty, ethnic conflict, and political instability that persist today."

It is clear from this that the negative impacts of European imperialism in Africa far outweigh whatever positive impacts there might be from such foreign interventions into the continent. Arabian culture on its part, completely erased indigenous African cultures in the areas where it prevailed, supplanting itself as the alternative, such that much of the indigenous cultures and belief systems that it supplanted are lost to us today.

A cartoon, uncredited, in the French magazine L'illustration dated January 3, 1885, on page 17, presents a critical view of the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885. It depicts Otto von Bismarck, the then Chancellor of Germany, cutting a cake labelled 'Africa' with a knife, symbolizing the division of the continent. The other delegates at the conference are shown sitting around the table, watching the scene in shock.

Too rich for its own good..

This very interesting piece on the BBC News website caught my attention -

The Democratic Republic of Congo is potentially one of the richest countries on earth, but colonialism, slavery and corruption have turned it into one of the poorest, historian Dan Snow writes..

"The world's bloodiest conflict since World War II is still rumbling on today.

It is a war in which more than five million people have died, millions more have been driven to the brink by starvation and disease and several million women and girls have been raped.

The Great War of Africa, a conflagration that has sucked in soldiers and civilians from nine nations and countless armed rebel groups, has been fought almost entirely inside the borders of one unfortunate country - the Democratic Republic of Congo.

It is a place seemingly blessed with every type of mineral, yet consistently rated lowest on the UN Human Development Index, where even the more fortunate live in grinding poverty.

I went to the Congo this summer to find out what it was about the country's past that had delivered it into the hands of unimaginable violence and anarchy.

The journey that I went on, through the Congo's abusive history, while travelling across its war-torn present, was the most disturbing experience of my career

I met rape victims, rebels, bloated politicians and haunted citizens of a country that has ceased to function - people who struggle to survive in a place cursed by a past that defies description, a history that will not release them from its death-like grip.

The Congo's apocalyptic present is a direct product of decisions and actions taken over the past five centuries.

In the late 15th Century an empire known as the Kingdom of Kongo dominated the western portion of the Congo, and bits of other modern states such as Angola.

It was sophisticated, had its own aristocracy and an impressive civil service.

When Portuguese traders arrived from Europe in the 1480s, they realised they had stumbled upon a land of vast natural wealth, rich in resources - particularly human flesh.

The Congo was home to a seemingly inexhaustible supply of strong, disease-resistant slaves. The Portuguese quickly found this supply would be easier to tap if the interior of the continent was in a state of anarchy.

They did their utmost to destroy any indigenous political force capable of curtailing their slaving or trading interests.

Money and modern weapons were sent to rebels, Kongolese armies were defeated, kings were murdered, elites slaughtered and secession was encouraged.

By the 1600s, the once-mighty kingdom had disintegrated into a leaderless, anarchy of mini-states locked in endemic civil war. Slaves, victims of this fighting, flowed to the coast and were carried to the Americas.

About four million people were forcibly embarked at the mouth of the Congo River. English ships were at the heart of the trade. British cities and merchants grew rich on the back of Congolese resources they would never see.

This first engagement with Europeans set the tone for the rest of the Congo's history.

Development has been stifled, government has been weak and the rule of law non-existent. This was not through any innate fault of the Congolese, but because it has been in the interests of the powerful to destroy, suppress and prevent any strong, stable, legitimate government. That would interfere - as the Kongolese had threatened to interfere before - with the easy extraction of the nation's resources. The Congo has been utterly cursed by its natural wealth.

Limitless water, from the world's second-largest river, the Congo, a benign climate and rich soil make it fertile, beneath the soil abundant deposits of copper, gold, diamonds, cobalt, uranium, coltan and oil are just some of the minerals that should make it one of the world's richest countries.

Instead it is the world's most hopeless.

The interior of the Congo was opened up in the late 19th Century by the British-born explorer Henry Morton Stanley, his dreams of free trading associations with communities he met were shattered by the infamous King of the Belgians, Leopold, who hacked out a vast private empire.

The world's largest supply of rubber was found at a time when bicycle and automobile tyres, and electrical insulation, had made it a vital commodity in the West.

The late Victorian bicycle craze was enabled by Congolese rubber collected by slave labourers.

To tap it, Congolese men were rounded up by a brutal Belgian-officered security force, their wives were interned to ensure compliance and were brutalised during their captivity. The men were then forced to go into the jungle and harvest the rubber.

Disobedience or resistance was met by immediate punishment - flogging, severing of hands, and death. Millions perished.

Tribal leaders capable of resisting were murdered, indigenous society decimated, proper education denied.

A culture of rapacious, barbaric rule by a Belgian elite who had absolutely no interest in developing the country or population was created, and it has endured.

In a move supposed to end the brutality, Belgium eventually annexed the Congo outright, but the problems in its former colony remained.

Mining boomed, workers suffered in appalling conditions, producing the materials that fired industrial production in Europe and America.

In World War I men on the Western Front and elsewhere did the dying, but it was Congo's minerals that did the killing.

The brass casings of allied shells fired at Passchendaele and the Somme were 75% Congolese copper.

In World War II, the uranium for the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from a mine in south-east Congo.

Western freedoms were defended with Congo's resources while black Congolese were denied the right to vote, or form unions and political associations. They were denied anything beyond the most basic of educations.

They were kept at an infantile level of development that suited the rulers and mine owners but made sure that when independence came there was no home-grown elite who could run the country.

Independence in 1960 was, therefore, predictably disastrous.

Bits of the vast country immediately attempted to break away, the army mutinied against its Belgian officers and within weeks the Belgian elite who ran the state evacuated leaving nobody with the skills to run the government or economy.

Of 5,000 government jobs pre-independence, just three were held by Congolese and there was not a single Congolese lawyer, doctor, economist or engineer.

Chaos threatened to engulf the region. The Cold War superpowers moved to prevent the other gaining the upper hand.

Sucked into these rivalries, the struggling Congolese leader, Patrice Lumumba, was horrifically beaten and executed by Western-backed rebels. A military strongman, Joseph-Desire Mobutu, who had a few years before been a sergeant in the colonial police force, took over.

Mobutu became a tyrant. In 1972 he changed his name to Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, meaning "the all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake".

The West tolerated him as long as the minerals flowed and the Congo was kept out of the Soviet orbit.

He, his family and friends bled the country of billions of dollars, a $100m palace was built in the most remote jungle at Gbadolite, an ultra-long airstrip next to it was designed to take Concorde, which was duly chartered for shopping trips to Paris.

 

Mobutu, pictured with Jacques Chirac, was courted by the West for decades

Dissidents were tortured or bought off, ministers stole entire budgets, government atrophied. The West allowed his regime to borrow billions, which was then stolen and today's Congo is still expected to pay the bill.

In 1997 an alliance of neighbouring African states, led by Rwanda - which was furious Mobutu's Congo was sheltering many of those responsible for the 1994 genocide - invaded, after deciding to get rid of Mobutu.

A Congolese exile, Laurent Kabila, was dredged up in East Africa to act as a figurehead. Mobutu's cash-starved army imploded, its leaders, incompetent cronies of the president, abandoning their men in a mad dash to escape.

Mobutu took off one last time from his jungle Versailles, his aircraft packed with valuables, his own unpaid soldiers firing at the plane as it lumbered into the air.

Rwanda had effectively conquered its titanic neighbour with spectacular ease. Once installed however, Kabila, Rwanda's puppet, refused to do as he was told.

Again Rwanda invaded, but this time they were just halted by her erstwhile African allies who now turned on each other and plunged Congo into a terrible war.

Foreign armies clashed deep inside the Congo as the paper-thin state collapsed totally and anarchy spread.

Hundreds of armed groups carried out atrocities, millions died.

Ethnic and linguistic differences fanned the ferocity of the violence, while control of Congo's stunning natural wealth added a terrible urgency to the fighting.

Forcibly conscripted child soldiers corralled armies of slaves to dig for minerals such as coltan, a key component in mobile phones, the latest obsession in the developed world, while annihilating enemy communities, raping women and driving survivors into the jungle to die of starvation and disease.

A deeply flawed, partial peace was patched together a decade ago. In the far east of the Congo, there is once again a shooting war as a complex web of domestic and international rivalries see rebel groups clash with the army and the UN, while tiny community militias add to the general instability.

The country has collapsed, roads no longer link the main cities, healthcare depends on aid and charity. The new regime is as grasping as its predecessors.

I rode on one of the trainloads of copper that go straight from foreign-owned mines to the border, and on to the Far East, rumbling past shanty towns of displaced, poverty-stricken Congolese.

The Portuguese, Belgians, Mobutu and the present government have all deliberately stifled the development of a strong state, army, judiciary and education system, because it interferes with their primary focus, making money from what lies under the Earth.

The billions of pounds those minerals have generated have brought nothing but misery and death to the very people who live on top of them, while enriching a microscopic elite in the Congo and their foreign backers, and underpinning our technological revolution in the developed world.

The Congo is a land far away, yet our histories are so closely linked. We have thrived from a lopsided relationship, yet we are utterly blind to it. The price of that myopia has been human suffering on an unimaginable scale.

See original story here

Lonmin-Marikana: The End of South Africa's Post-Apartheid Settlement?

The killing of 34 striking miners by police at the Marikana mine in South Africa last Friday is a tragedy that touches more than just the families and communities of the dead. It also highlights the failure of post-apartheid South Africa to improve the lives of  a majority of its citizens.

The incident has opened up wounds and exposed the bitter ironies and contradictions of the country almost 20 years after the end of apartheid. Graphic TV coverage filmed just behind the police line went round the world and recalled memories of massacres from the Apartheid era – Sharpeville, Shell House, Boipatong and Bisho.

Trouble at the mine had been brewing for some time. A report by the church-backed Bench Marks Foundation last year revealed that local communities at the Marikana Mine were “frustrated and angry with the mining company… levels of fatal incidents were unacceptable… residential conditions under which Lonmin employees live are appalling”. The report said that last year the company sacked 9,000 workers. 

Lonmin, the London based company that owns the mine, is the reconstituted Lonrho which was described in 1973 by the then Conservative Prime Minister, Ted Heath, as “the unacceptable face of capitalism”. Its internal procedures at that time broke company law and Lonrho also ignored sanctions against white-ruled Rhodesia. Its chief executive, Tiny Rowland, spread corruption throughout Africa, and systematically exploited the continent’s workforce. That era has thankfully passed. But ironically, one of its current non-executive directors is Cyril Ramaphosa, the former leader of the National Union of Mineworkers and the key negotiator for the Africa National Congress in the talks that led to the end of apartheid. Evidently, not even his status and skills could create a deal that would have avoided these deaths.

We will have to wait for the government inquiry to report on the causes of the fatal clashes, but I have seen no clear analysis of what led directly to the confrontation. Most agree that the strike was led by a new militant union, the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMC), which was spreading a militant message and edging out the 30-year-old National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). The NUM is now in an uneasy alliance with the ANC government and subscribes to its broad policies and strategies. It seems that the new AMC Union and some of the miners at Marikana saw an opportunity of getting higher wages by striking and using violence. It is also possible that it was a one-off incident caused by unfortunate misunderstandings.

Somewhat confusing is the fact that although almost a third of the workforce at the mine are ‘sub-contractors’ – casual labour, recruited and paid by gang masters – the strike was led by the rock drill operators: an elite workforce who do tough, dirty, dangerous work but are not badly paid by South African standards. They, like most workers in the formal sector, got above inflation pay-rises last year.

It’s possible that something deeper is happening here. The success of the new South Africa has always depended on the ability of the government to rebalance society after apartheid by creating jobs and providing health, education and other benefits to the mass of people. On the whole, South Africans have been very patient. At first, the poorest were encouraged simply by seeing black ministers and civil servants in government. They would wait their turn.

Like two lines tracking across a graph, the expectations of the people and the delivery of the state narrowed, widened, and narrowed again over the years. But they have still not met. The clock has always been ticking and it is clear after nearly 20 years, the gap has actually widened. And now a new generation is coming through who never experienced explicit apartheid and the struggle against it. They are exposed to all the consumerism and celebrity lifestyles that the rich world produces. They want it and they want it now.

The deal struck in the early 1990s between the last apartheid government, the ANC and the mining houses was that the free market policies be allowed to continue (under apartheid this was, of course, an un-free market) but with three changes. Firstly all negative discrimination had to end. Economic opportunity as well as the franchise would be extended to all South Africans as would services such as health, education and pensions. Secondly, black people should be given an ownership stake in South African business and a greater role in managing it. This positive discrimination became known at Black Economic Empowerment; a huge panoply of rules and regulations, tax break and contracts to incentivise or force companies to give stakes and employment to non white people. Thirdly, the mining houses, which are the major source of South Africa’s wealth, were allowed to de-list in South Africa and ship their capital off to other countries and tax havens.

Has the deal worked? A short book published this week by the veteran South African economist, Professor Sampie Terreblanche, spells out why is hasn’t. He points out that for most of the last century 20 percent of the South African population owned 70 percent of the country’s wealth, while 70 percent of the population owned only 20 percent of the wealth. Put another way: in 1993, the year before Nelson Mandela was elected President, the richest 10 percent of South Africans owned 53.9 percent of the country’s wealth.  In 2008 the richest 10 percent owned 58.1 percent. During the same period, the income of the poorest 50 percent declined from 8.4 to 7.8 percent. This growing imbalance makes South Africa one of the most – if not the most – unequal society in the world, says Terreblanche. “Since the early 1970s the poorest 50 percent of the population has been exposed to a vicious circle – or a downward spiral – of growing poverty, growing unemployment and growing inequality” he says.

Terreblanche blames this growing poverty on the historic political, economic and social compromise agreement between the last apartheid government, the ANC and the South African Communist Party. He writes: “When it was decided that taxation and expenditure would remain a fixed proportion of GDP, it was not possible for the ANC government to implement a comprehensive redistribution policy. The elite compromise created the space for a black elite formation, but not for a policy that would alleviate the poverty of the poorest 50 percent”. In fact, he says, it has made it worse.

Was the explosion at Marikana the first sign that people realise the pact has not worked? 

By Richard Dowden and taken from here