Picture and Words Kwanele Ngogela and Mathieu Dasnois/ GroundUp
The late Martin Wittenberg, an econometrics professor at the University of Cape Town, had a brilliant way of portraying inequality in South Africa.
He used a graphic of people, with height representing income. He cast himself as an average person, 1.8 metres tall, representing average income. The graphic showed a line of people, the population of South Africa, walking past him over the span of one hour.
One minute and 650,000 people later, the people were barely the size of his ankles. Thirty minutes in, halfway, people reached his thighs. Only in the last 15 minutes do people reach his average height, and in the last few minutes, we see people the size of buildings, and, finally, taller than Table Mountain.
South Africa is the most unequal country in the world , according to the World Bank. Even worse, while developing countries have managed to reduce inequality on average, South Africa has not .
