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WE NEED TO FIX THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE DOUBLE STOREY: By Vusi Mona

In 1997/98 or thereabout, former President Thabo Mbeki warned (and I may be paraphrasing him): “When the poor rise, they’ll rise against us all.” 

I wrote an editorial comment about his statement in Tribute magazine, stating that it will take the people of Alex (a symbol of poverty and squalor) a few minutes to cross over the M1 and reduce Sandton (the richest square mile in Africa) to ashes.

Zizi might not have known then what the trigger of the poor rising would be. But he was on the money. We do need to address poverty and inequality, and urgently so. And we must not shy away from the racialised nature of these problems. They do have a largely black face. 

IN 2003, addressing a Black Management Forum conference in Cape Town, Mbeki continued with his diagnosis. He said South Africa effectively had two economies - the one white and the other black. He used a double-storey house as a metaphor for the South African economy, saying what made ours strange and ugly is that it had no connecting staircase.

Staying with his metaphor, I think attempts have been made in the last 27 years (including by him) to build the “staircase” but clearly these have not been enough. Worsening the situation is that access to the staircase has been selective and at times grossly unfair. Few blacks have made it to the first floor. The ground floor is now getting increasingly agitated and threatening to bring the whole double-storey down. 

We who are on the first floor can send our troops to calm down the fellows below. It might work temporarily but it is not sustainable. We need to fix the architecture of the double storey!

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