Middle Class

Zinhle Sokhela:  PCB Director

There is nothing wrong with middle class aspiration.   In fact, the growth of a middle class is one of the most important indicators of a growing economy.   The middle class has buying power and constitutes the most significant group of consumers.   The expansion of the middle class throughout Africa is the reason why the continent has become increasingly attractive to investors.   Both China and India, whose economies are growing at phenomenal rates, are characterised by a rapidly expanding middle class.   I cannot quote exact figures, but I think I would be right in suggesting that public servants are at the very core of the middle class.   These are the people who earn regular salaries in relatively stable jobs.   They drive motor cars and often live in suburbia, forsaking their township origins as their incomes improve.    They, too, are ambitious and seek to improve their standards of living.   Within the middle class there are different levels of income.   Some are just above the lowest limit, while others earn substantial salaries and are peripherally wealthy.

At the beginning of the recent public sector strike it was noted by a newspaper reader that the workers who had gathered to protest at Grey’s Hospital arrived in their motor cars, not in buses and taxis as one might have expected of a workers’ strike.   Some of these vehicles could not have been owned by people of meagre income.  Yet many of the placards carried by protesters have called for a “living wage” and have equated the circumstances of the public servants to those of the poor.    Union leaders supported the wage demands as being necessary to ensure that the people in public service were better motivated to provide essential services to the poor.   The implicit message in this was: it is in the interests of the poor to pay the middle class workers more.    

I wonder what the poor think about all this.   They are mostly unemployed and therefore without any regular income at all.   Their next meal is a matter of speculation, while their living conditions are appalling.   Worst still, they are without hope, for nothing seems to be on the agenda to really address their plight.   COSATU professes to support the poor, but continues to seek better conditions for those who have jobs.    It is a reality that if employers, government included, have to pay more and more to those in employment, they will employ fewer people in the long run.   This is one of the handicaps of municipalities.   In recent years they have been forced to pay increases in excess of inflation.   Not only does this reduce their ability to provide adequate and efficient services, but, worse, it leads to the freezing of posts.   Vacant posts, sometimes very critical ones, have to lie unfilled because there is no money. 

I am not suggesting that middle class aspiration should be sacrificed in the interests of poverty alleviation.   There are many other sacrifices that should be made first.    Some of these are priorities of government that are not supported by the public.   They are those which either sustain political dominance or government’s own interests.   I suspect we’d be appalled at the wastage, at the extravagance, at the inefficiency if only we knew about all expenditure of public money.   We read about some of it from time to time; ministers spending a great deal on motor cars, for example, or hotels.   While this may reflect their legal entitlements, these regulations need to be amended in the interests of achieving a more equitable society, one which is now measured to be the most unequal in the world.   Isn’t this a travesty?   We have one of the most rights-conscious and liberal constitutions in the world, yet we have applied it in such a way that the gap between the rich and the poor has grown to obscene proportions.    To a very large extent, this issue has been at the heart of the recent strikes.    Middle class workers feel that they are expected to make sacrifices in the interests of the country and the poor while the ‘fat cats’ continue to grow super rich without any check on their greed at all.              

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