Those of you who have read my ramblings up till now have probably already realised that I like to question things. One of the things I have been questioning is the notion of equality.
Often, we're told that 10% of the population holds 90% of the wealth, but I like to question statistics, so I thought I would look at that in a little more detail.
First, there's no way that that 10% of the population could all possibly be white - simply because we don't have that many white people.
Currently, in South Africa, there are somewhere around 4 million white people. Of those, a few hundred thousand are poverty stricken, which we can assume knocks 1/2 a million off the potential 'middle class' tally.' Then, if we assume that only half of those number are old enough to work, we're left with roughly 1.75 million people who could possibly be middle class.
What about black South Africans?
According to the website SouthAfrica.info, in 2007, the black middle class numbered 2.6 million - which was a 600,000 increase over the previous year. Assuming that that growth increased stably over the next 5 years, that would mean an additional 3 million people who could possibly be called 'black diamonds' or middle class. A total of 5.6 million.
That's about three times as many as the white people who can claim the same economic standing.
So why are we told lies about this?
Actually, we're not. But we're fed this information in the form of percentages, based on total population figures.
So, while white South Africans make up less than 10% of our population, the other 40 million who are black (nearly 80%) make up a much higher proportion.
Even if there were 4 million middle class black people in the country, that would still only be 10% of the black community. The same figure applied to white people would mean everyone is middle class - which is not true.
All of this means very little to most people. However, it does help to understand that our government is manipylating statistics in their own favor, to support their policies and claims.
On a one on one basis, there are more black middle class earners out there than white. Think about that for a minute.
If there weren't SO many poor black people out there, and if they didn't have more children than they could afford, those figures would look very different.
As Bob Marley said. Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery.
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