M
adiba passed away on 5th December 2013, leaving
South Africans with a legacy and value system
we must cherish and emulate! Madiba was 95
years old when he left us and the country will
be celebrating 20 years of democracy a few
months after he passed on. The first edition of the Banker for 2014
thus marks two seminal moments in the history of our proud
nation!
This is an opportune moment for us to take a few steps back
and make a frank assessment of the first 20 years of democracy.
There is absolutely no doubt that SA has become a better place
to live in for its entire people over the past 20 years. We have a
constitutional democracy that is the envy of many parts of the
world and political freedom which ensures equal rights to every
human being in SA. Substantially more people have access to
electricity, potable water, municipal services and other services
that improve their lives. Substantially more children attend
school today than was the case during apartheid. We have started
addressing inequities in economic access and economic control.
We have enabled access to homes for over two million people in
the 20 years of our democracy, more than any nation coming out
of repression into democracy. We have worked with others to
put Africa, our continent, on the global map, and we have built
an economy that has the potential to grow and contribute to the
ongoing growth of the continent.
A recent Goldman Sachs report identifies the following positive
SA DEMOCRACY
developments in the first 20 years of democracy:
• GDP almost tripled from $136bn to $400bn;
• Inflation fell from a 1980-1994 average of 14% to a 1994-2012
average of 6%;
• Gross gold and FX reserves rose from $3bn to a prudent $50bn;
• Tax receipts of R114bn from 1.7m people rose to R814bn from
13.7m people;
• In the last decade there was a dramatic rise in the middle class,
with 4.5m consumers graduating upwards from the lower (1-4)
Living Standards Measure (LSM) and in total 10m consumers
being added to the middle-higher LSMs (5-10);
• Social grant beneficiaries rose from 2.4m to 16.1m.
However, we have also conducted ourselves in a way that
threatens all these gains and hampers our ability to grow our
economy and create jobs for millions of people. We have more
children in school than at any time in our history, but the
quality of our education and the education infrastructure has
deteriorated. We consistently find ourselves close to last, if
not last, in mathematics and science proficiency in the World
Economic Forum Global Competitive Reports. Yet we need to
produce people, through the education system, to participate in
an increasingly technical and IT-based global economy.
Many of the houses we built and handed to people are
defective and falling apart. We have more informal settlements
today than at any time in our history. We have not yet broken the
spatial development patterns created by apartheid. We are
We are falling short in creating an environment for economic growth.
Edition 9 BANKER SA
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