'South Africa's Victim Ideology'-Moeletsi Mbeki

We are paying the price for half measures and a victim ­ideology that drives consumption instead of production...A black upper class is now in place which, despite its size, is significant and established, he says. There has been a badly needed – though at best partial – redistribution of wealth in favour of blacks, not least through the tax system and government expenditure, but also through initiatives such as Black Economic Empowerment, a want-to-be equitable wealth plan closely associated with his older brother Thabo Mbeki, who led the country from 1999 until he was abruptly ousted from office by his own party, the ANC, in 2008.

Such piecemeal efforts do not amount to transformative justice, however, "which in South Africa should be about raising the earning power of the worker. We have a capitalist system and therefore by definition, the productive assets are owned by small groups, for whom large groups work. If their earning power was enhanced, it would have a knock-on effect on so much else, not least our education and health systems. That would have been real transformative justice."

But it didn't happen that way. Instead, the wrong measures were put in place, in his view. "The ANC adopted the Washington Consensus and other policies that began to shrink rather than grow the economy. Today it's stagnated, if not regressing. Look at the manufacturing system, once the main employer. Now it's shrinking and that's critical because it employs the semi-skilled and unskilled who are the bulk of the South African labour force.