Economic apartheid: lessons from SA

SOUTH Africa is the most unequal society in the world. In one suburb, rows of tidy houses with manicured lawns, white picket fences, and sparkling blue swimming pools portray a life of comfort and affluence.

- SŐZARN BARDAY

Yet just a short distance away, sprawling informal settlements tell a starkly different story - clusters of makeshift shelters cobbled together from corrugated iron, plastic sheeting, and cardboard. These fragile structures offer little protection against the Cape’s harsh winters. For thousands of South Africans, however, this is the daily reality - marked by inadequate access to clean water, electricity, and sanitation.

Under apartheid, Black South Africans were forcibly removed to remote Bantustans and systematically barred from white urban areas through segregation laws and pass systems. After apartheid formally ended, millions migrated to cities like Johannesburg and Cape Town in search of work and a better future. However, the post-apartheid state - hamstrung by the economic compromises made during the political transition - was ill-equipped to accommodate this wave of urban migration.

The result has been the persistence - and in some ways the deepening - of inequality, now often described as “economic apartheid.” While a small Black elite has joined the historically privileged white minority, the underlying economic structures have remained largely untouched. This continuity was no accident. During the early 1990s, national attention was focused on constitutional negotiations promising a nonracial democracy.

In many ways, South Africa's democracy was born in chains: politically emancipated, but economically constrained.

Though the National Party was prepared to relinquish political power, it secured key economic concessions that severely limited the ANC capacity to implement transformative reforms. Fundamental decisions regarding land redistribution, nationalisation, and economic justice were effectively placed beyond the reach of the new democratic government - like land redistribution and economic restructuring. One of the most enduring constraints was Section 25 of the 1996 Constitution, known as the “property clause.”