End of Apartheid in South Africa? Not in Economic Terms<br />“We basically compounded the problems of apartheid by buying up all this cheap land as far out of the city as possible,” said Alan Hirsch, a senior official in the Trade<br />and Industry Department during the Mandela government, and now director of the Graduate School of Development Policy and Practice at the University of Cape Town.<br />“The A. N.C.’s primary objective was inclusion into the existing system,” said Moeletsi Mbeki, deputy chairman of the South African Institute of International Affairs<br />and a brother of the former South African president Thabo Mbeki.<br />“The system,” he said, “doesn’t work.”<br />The system does work, as it happens, though often for the benefit of the people running it.<br />Ten percent of all South Africans — the majority white — owns more than 90 percent of national wealth,<br />according to a 2016 research paper by Anna Orthofer, a graduate student at Stellenbosch University.<br />“We never dismantled apartheid,” said Ayabonga Cawe, a former economist for Oxfam, the international anti-poverty organization,<br />and now the host of a radio show that explores national affairs.<br />“It’s a very deep structural problem,” said Ian Goldin, who served as a senior economic adviser to Nelson Mandela when he was president of South Africa,<br />and is now a professor of globalization at the University of Oxford in Britain.<br />“I like seeing people who are better than me,” he said.
