# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
New research shows that the average monthly earnings paid to employees in the formal non-agricultural sector is R17,517.

This amounts to an annual salary of R210,204.

According to StasSA, the average monthly earnings showed a quarter-on-quarter increase of 0.7% in monthly earnings paid to employees, from R17,392 in August 2015 to R17,517 in November 2015.

On an annual basis, average monthly earnings paid to employees increased by 6.7% from R16,424 in November 2014 to R17,517 in November 2015, the research organisation said.

Data published earlier in March in the BankservAfrica Disposable Salary Index (BDSI) showed that South Africans working in the formal sector took home far more money in February, than they did a year ago.

According to the data seen passing through the BankservAfrica payment system last month, the average take-home pay in the formal sector increased by 8.7% compared to the same month in 2015.

"This means that, despite the inflationary increase, take-home pay also rose by about 2.3% above the inflation rate to an average of R13,511 in January 2016," said Dr Caroline Belrose, Head of Knowledge and Risk Services at BankservAfrica.
Read: Average bonus pay in South Africa in 2015
Quarterly employment statistics showed that employment increased by 43,000 quarter-on-quarter, from 8.949 million in September 2015 to 8.992 million in December 2015.

This was largely due to increases in the following industries: trade (42,000 or 2,3%); business services (16,000 or 0.8%) and community services (13,000 or 0.5%).

There were decreases reported by the following industries: mining and quarrying (-14,000 or -2.9%); construction (-8,000 or -1,7%); manufacturing (-4 000 or -0.4%); and transport (-2,000 or -0.5%).

More on South Africa
Big jump in pay in South Africa in 2016 How much money car guards really make in South Africa How much money taxi drivers really make in South Africa Number of South Africans earning R50,000 per month doubles

Staff Writer
BusinessTech's Staff Writer is directly plugged into the South African Internet backbone, and spits out press releases and other news as they receive it. They are believed to be cl...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How much money the average person in South Africa gets paid

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
New research shows that the average monthly earnings paid to employees in the formal non-agricultural sector is R17,517. This amounts to an annual salary of R210,204. According to StasSA, the average monthly earnings showed a quarter-on-quarter increase of 0.7% in monthly earnings paid to employees, from R17,392 in August 2015 to R17,517 in November 2015.

# data[].attributes.headline
Article about South Africa Joining the BRICS

# data[].attributes.subject
Article about South Africa Joining the BRICS

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
BRICS is a grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa formed by the 2010 addition of South Africa to the predecessor BRIC. The original acronym "BRIC", or "the BRICs", was coined in 2001 by Goldman Sachs economist Jim O'Neill to describe fast-growing economies that he predicted would collectively dominate the global economy by 2050.

The BRICS nations encompass about 27% of the world's land surface and 42% of the global population. Brazil, Russia, India, and China are among the world's ten largest countries by population, area, and GDP (PPP), and are considered to be current superpowers, or potential emerging superpowers. All five states are members of the G20, with a combined nominal GDP of US$28 trillion (about 27% of the gross world product), a total GDP (PPP) of around US$57 trillion (33% of global GDP PPP), and an estimated US$4.5 trillion in combined foreign reserves (as of 2018).

The BRICS were originally identified for the purpose of highlighting investment opportunities and had not been a formal intergovernmental organization. Since 2009, they have increasingly formed into a more cohesive geopolitical bloc, with their governments meeting annually at formal summits and coordinating multilateral policies. Bilateral relations among BRICS are conducted mainly on the basis of non-interference, equality, and mutual benefit.

The BRICS nations are considered the foremost geopolitical rival to the G7 bloc of leading advanced economies, implementing competing initiatives such as the New Development Bank, the BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement, the BRICS payment system, the BRICS Joint Statistical Publication and the BRICS basket reserve currency. Since 2022, the group has sought to expand membership, with several developing countries expressing interest in joining. BRICS has received both praise and criticism from numerous commentators.

In August 2023, at the 15th BRICS Summit, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had been invited to join the bloc. Full membership is scheduled to take effect on 1 January 2024.

The term BRIC was originally developed in the context of foreign investment strategies. It was introduced in the 2001 publication, Building Better Global Economic BRICs by then-chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Jim O'Neill.

The foreign ministers of the initial four BRIC General states (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) met in New York City in September 2006 at the margins of the General Debate of the UN Assembly, beginning a series of high-level meetings. A full-scale diplomatic meeting was held in Yekaterinburg, Russia, on 16 June 2009.

The BRIC grouping's 1st formal summit, also held in Yekaterinburg, commenced on 16 June 2009, with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Dmitry Medvedev, Manmohan Singh, and Hu Jintao, the respective leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, and China, all attending. The summit's focus was on improving the global economic situation and reforming financial institutions, and discussed how the four countries could better co-operate in the future. There was further discussion of ways that developing countries, such as 3/4 of the BRIC members, could become more involved in global affairs.

In the aftermath of the 2009 Yekaterinburg summit, the BRIC nations announced the need for a new global reserve currency, which would have to be "diverse, stable and predictable." Although the statement that was released did not directly criticize the perceived "dominance" of the US dollar - something that Russia had criticized in the past - it did spark a fall in the value of the dollar against other major currencies.

In 2010, South Africa began efforts to join the BRIC grouping, and the process for its formal admission began in August of that year. South Africa officially became a member nation on 24 December 2010, after being formally invited by China to join and subsequently accepted by other BRIC countries. The group was renamed BRICS - with the "S" standing for South Africa - to reflect the group's expanded membership. In April 2011, the President of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, attended the 2011 BRICS summit in Sanya, China, as a full member.

Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and Russian president Vladimir Putin during the BRICS in Brasília, Brazil.

In June 2012, the BRICS nations pledged $75 billion to boost the lending power of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). However, this loan was conditional on IMF voting reforms. In March 2013, during the fifth BRICS summit in Durban, the member countries agreed to create a global financial institution to cooperate with the western-dominated IMF and World Bank. They planned to set up this New Development Bank by 2014. However, disputes relating to burden sharing and location slowed down the agreements.[citation needed ]

BRICS Tower headquarters in Shanghai

At the BRICS leaders meeting in St Petersburg in September 2013, China committed $41 billion towards the pool; Brazil, India, and Russia $18 billion each; and South Africa $5 billion. China, who held the world's largest foreign exchange reserves and contributes the bulk of the currency pool, wanted a more significant managing role. China also wanted to be the location of the reserve. In October 2013, Russia's Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said that creating a $100 billion in funds designated to steady currency markets would be taken in early 2014. The Brazilian finance minister, Guido Mantega, confirmed that the fund would be created by March 2014. However, by April 2014, the currency reserve pool and development bank had yet to be set up, and the date was rescheduled to 2015. One driver for the BRICS development bank is that the existing institutions primarily benefit extra-BRICS corporations, and the political significance is notable because it allows BRICS member states "to promote their interests abroad... and can highlight the strengthening positions of countries whose opinion is frequently ignored by their developed American and European colleagues."[citation needed ]

New Development Bank's logo.

In July 2014, during the sixth BRICS summit in Fortaleza, the BRICS signed the document to create the US$100 billion New Development Bank (formerly known as the "BRICS Development Bank") and a reserve currency pool worth over another US$100 billion. Documents on cooperation between BRICS export credit agencies and an agreement of cooperation on innovation were also inked.[citation needed ] The Fortaleza summit was followed by a BRICS meeting with the Union of South American Nations presidents in Brasilia.

Since 2011, the National Institutes of Statistics of the BRICS group of countries ( IBGE, Rosstat, the National Bureau of Statistics of China, the Central Statistics Office (India) and Statistics South Africa) produce an annual joint statistical publication in order to put statistical production in perspective, compare adopted methodologies and statistical results. The publication serves as single data platform for the mutual benefit of participating countries.

Since 2012, the BRICS group of countries have been planning an optical fibre submarine communications cable system to carry telecommunications between the BRICS countries, known as the BRICS Cable. Part of the motivation for the project was the spying of the U.S. National Security Agency on all telecommunications that flowed in and out of United States territory. As of 2023, construction of the proposed cable network has not started.[citation needed ]

After the 2015 summit, the respective communications ministers, under a Russian proposal, had a first summit for their ministries in Moscow in October where the host minister, Nikolai Nikiforov, proposed an initiative to further tighten their information technology sectors and challenge the monopoly of the United States in the sector.[citation needed ]

In August 2019, the communications ministers of the BRICS countries signed a letter of intent to cooperate in the Information and Communication Technology sector. This agreement was signed in the fifth edition of meeting of communication ministers of countries member of the group held in Brasília, Brazil.

Meeting of BRICS foreign ministers on 22 September 2022

The New Development Bank plans on giving out $15 billion to member nations to help their struggling economies. Member countries are hoping for a smooth comeback and a continuation of economic trade pre-COVID-19. The 2020 BRICS summit was held virtually in St. Petersburg, Russia and discussed how to handle the COVID-19 pandemic and how to fix the multilateral system via reforms. During the 13th BRICS summit, in 2021, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi called for a transparent investigation into the origins of COVID-19 under the World Health Organization with the full cooperation of "all countries", and Chinese leader Xi Jinping spoke directly afterwards, calling on BRICS countries to "oppose politicisation" of the process.

In May 2023, South Africa announced that they would be giving diplomatic immunity to Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials so that they could attend the 15th BRICS Summit despite the ICC arrest warrant for Putin. In July 2023, the Russian president announced that he will not personally attend the BRICS summit in Johannesburg on 22-24 August despite good relations with the South African nation. Russian news channels noted that Putin will remotely participate online in all BRICS leaders' sessions, including its Business Forum, and also deliver his remarks virtually.

In August 2023, at the 15th BRICS Summit, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that six emerging market group countries ( Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) had been invited to join the bloc. Full membership is scheduled to take effect on 1 January 2024.

The aim of latest expansion is touted as part of plan to build a "multipolar" world order that puts weight to hitherto subdued voices of the Global South and brings them to the centre of the world agenda.

The grouping has held annual summits since 2009, with member countries taking turns to host. Prior to South Africa's admission, two BRIC summits were held, in 2009 and 2010. The first five-member BRICS summit was held in 2011. The most recent BRICS leaders' summit took place virtually on 23 June 2022 hosted by China. India hosted the BRICS 2021 summit in New Delhi and, amid tensions with China, Chinese leader Xi Jinping had made a soft move by supporting India's Chairmanship in 2021.

16 June 2009
Dmitry Medvedev
Yekaterinburg (Sevastianov's House)

The summit was to discuss the global recession taking place at the time, future cooperation among states, and trade. Some of the specific topics discussed were food, trade, climate trade, and security for the nations. They called out for a more influential voice and representation for up-and-coming markets. Note at the time South Africa was not yet admitted to the BRICS organization at the time.

15 April 2010
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
Guests: Jacob Zuma ( President of South Africa) and Riyad al-Maliki ( Foreign Minister of the Palestinian National Authority). The second summit continued on the conversation of the global recession and how to recover. They had a conversation on the IMF, climate change, and more ways to form cooperation among states.

26-27 March 2013

The fifth summit discusses the New Development Bank proposition and Contingent Reserve Agreement. BRICS also announced the Business Council and its Think Tank Council.

14-17 July 2014
Dilma Rousseff
BRICS New Development Bank and BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement agreements signed. The members of BRICS conversed with each other about political coordination, development, and economic growth. They established the Fortaleza Declaration and Action Plan.

8-9 July 2015
Vladimir Putin
Joint summit with SCO- EAEU. The seventh summit discussed global, economic problems, and better ways to foster cooperation among member states.

25-27 July 2018
Cyril Ramaphosa
Johannesburg (Sandton Convention Centre)

The tenth summit had the members discuss their rising industries. Hoping they can cut a bigger slice of the industry market.

13-14 November 2019
Jair Bolsonaro
The eleventh summit discussed advancements in the BRICS's science and innovation fields. Primarily trying to advance technology and digital currency. They made mutual agreements to help stop drug trafficking and organized crime; both internationally and internally

21-23 July 2020 (postponed due to COVID-19 pandemic)
17 November 2020 (video conference)
Vladimir Putin
Joint summit with SCO. Discussing a mutual agreement on helping BRICS member countries to help foster better living standards and quality of life for each country's people. Plans on focusing on peace, economies, and cultural societal issues.

23 June 2022 (video conference)

A major development on the summit was creation of a new, basket type reserve currency. The currency, which is challenging US dollar, combines BRICS currencies and is backed by precious metals.

22-24 August 2023
Cyril Ramaphosa
Johannesburg (Sandton Convention Centre)

Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates were invited to join the bloc. Full membership will take effect on 1 January 2024.

Country

Population
(millions)
(2023)[66][67]

Total GDP (2023)

GDP per capita (2023)

GDP growth
(2023 est.)[68]

Foreign
Exchange
Reserves
(2023)[69]

HFCE
(2018)

Government
spending

Exports[70]

Imports[71]

Literacy
rate[72]

Life
expectancy
(years, avg.)[73]

HDI (2021)[74]

Nominal(billion USD)

[75]

PPP(billion USD)
[75]

Nominal
USD
[76]

PPP
USD
[76]

59.89

399

990

6,485

16,091

0.1%

$53.8 bn

$211693 bln

$ 95.3 bn

$ 123.73 bn

$ 68.97 bn

94.3%

64.8 yrs

0.713 (high)

Average

627.06

3,754

8,120

8,941

19,041

3.5%

$987.0 bn

$1868 956 bln

$800.6 bn

$970.19 bn

$711.86 bn

93%

73.4 yrs

0.739 (high)

Total

3245.36

26,060

51,171

-

-

-

$5124.4 bn

$9344 797 bln

$4,036.9 bn

$4,879.98 bn

$3,112.65 bn

-

-

-

Bangladesh, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Uruguay are members of BRICS New Development Bank.

Map key:

Will join on January 1, 2024

Expressed an interest in joining

Rejected invitation offer

Discussions about the expansion and entry of new member countries were little addressed until the early 2020s, after this date, leaders and top ranking diplomats of the founding nations began discussions for the expansion of the group.

There is no formal application process as such to join BRICS, but any hopeful government must receive unanimous backing from all existing BRICS members-Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa-to receive an invitation.

A total of six countries are scheduled to join BRICS on 1 January 2024:

Argentina (opposed by a main opposition presidential candidate)

A total of 14 countries have formally applied to join BRICS, listed as follows:

The New Development Bank (NDB) is based in Shanghai.

The New Development Bank (NDB) and Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) were signed into treaty at the 2014 BRICS summit in Brazil.

Equal distribution of shares between the shareholders of the NDB.

The financial architecture of BRICS is made of the New Development Bank (NDB) and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA). These components were signed into treaty in 2014 and became active in 2015.

The New Development Bank (NDB), formally referred to as the BRICS Development Bank, is a multilateral development bank operated by the five BRICS states. The bank's primary focus of lending is infrastructure projects with authorized lending of up to $34 billion annually. South Africa hosts the African headquarters of the bank. The bank has a starting capital of $50 billion, with wealth increased to $100 billion over time. Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa initially contributed $10 billion each to bring the total to $50 billion. As of 2020, it had 53 projects under way worth around $15 billion.

In 2021, Bangladesh, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Uruguay joined the NDB.

The BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) is a framework for providing protection against global liquidity pressures. This includes currency issues where members' national currencies are being adversely affected by global financial pressures. Emerging economies that experienced rapid economic liberalization went through increased economic volatility, bringing an uncertain macroeconomic environment. The CRA competes with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Along with the New Development Bank, it is an example of increasing South-South cooperation. It was established in 2015 by the BRICS countries. The legal basis is formed by the Treaty for the Establishment of a BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement, signed in Fortaleza in July 2014. With its inaugural meetings of the BRICS CRA Governing Council and Standing Committee, held on 4 September 2015, in Ankara, Turkey it entered into force upon ratification by all BRICS states, announced at the 7th BRICS summit in July 2015.

At the 2015 BRICS summit in Russia, ministers from BRICS nations initiated consultations for a payment system that would be an alternative to the SWIFT system. The stated goal was to move to settlements in national currencies. The Central Bank of Russia highlighted the main benefits as backup and redundancy in case there were disruptions to the SWIFT system.

China also launched its own alternative to SWIFT: the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System, which enables financial institutions worldwide to send and receive information about financial transactions. India also has its alternative Structured Financial Messaging System (SFMS), as do Russia SPFS and Brazil Pix.

BRICS countries committed to study the feasibility of a new common currency or similar, at the 2023 BRICS summit in South Africa. Fair and easier international trade as well as a major reduction in costs of transactions would be some of the reasons why the countries could forge a currency union.

The five leaders of BRICS in Brasília, Brazil, in 2019.

Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro welcoming the BRICS leaders.

In 2012, Hu Jintao, the then General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and President of China, described the BRICS countries as defenders and promoters of developing countries and a force for world peace. Western analysts have highlighted potential divisions and weaknesses in the grouping, including significant economic instabilities, disagreements among the members over the UN Security Council reform, and India and China's disputes over territorial issues.

On 9 April 2013, Isobel Coleman, director of the Civil Society, Markets, and Democracy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations, claimed that the BRICS members share a lack of consensus. They uphold drastically different political systems, from a vibrant democracy in Brazil to entrenched oligarchy in Russia, and their economies are little integrated and are different in size by orders of magnitude. She also claimed that the significant difference in GDP influences the reserves: China accounts for over 41% of the contribution, which in turn leads to its bigger political say within the association.

In 2014, the Indian Marxist author Vijay Prashad raised the limitations of the BRICS as a political and economic "locomotive of the South" because they follow neoliberal policies. They have established neither new counter-balancing institutions nor come up with an alternative ideology. Furthermore, the BRICS project, argues Prashad, has no ability to challenge the primacy of the United States and NATO.

After the 2023 BRICS Summit, Con Coughlin, defence and foreign affairs editor at The Daily Telegraph, claimed "the challenge BRICS presents to the established world order seems destined to failure" and accused the organization of being used by China as a vehicle for expanding its global influence. Coughlin also noted the contradictions within the organization, such as the border dispute between China and India, and called for greater Western engagement with India as part of a new strategic alliance.

A multi-year study at Tufts University found that the "common portrayal of BRICS as a China-dominated group primarily pursuing anti-U.S. agendas is misplaced ... The BRICS countries connect around common development interests and a quest for a multipolar world order in which no single power dominates. Yet BRICS consolidation has turned the group into a potent negotiation force that now challenges Washington's geopolitical and economic goals".

The group at each summit elects one of the heads of state of the component countries to serve as President Pro Tempore of the BRICS. In 2019, the pro tempore presidency was held by the president of Brazil.

The theme of the 11th BRICS summit was "BRICS: economic growth for an innovative future", and the priorities of the Brazilian Pro Tempore Presidency for 2019 are the following - Strengthening of the cooperation in Science, technology and innovation; Enhancement of the cooperation on digital economy; Invigoration of the cooperation on the fight against transnational crime, especially against organized crime, money laundering and drug trafficking; Encouragement to the rapprochement between the New Development Bank (NDB) and the BRICS Business Council. Currently the new President Pro Tempore is Russia and their goals are: investing into BRICS countries in order to strengthen everyone's economies, cooperating in the energy and environmental industries, helping with young children and coming up with resolutions on migration and peacekeeping.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
BRICS is a grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa formed by the 2010 addition of South Africa to the predecessor BRIC. The original acronym "BRIC", or "the BRICs", was coined in 2001 by Goldman Sachs economist Jim O'Neill to describe fast-growing economies that he predicted would collectively dominate the global economy by 2050.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
At the end of the 1990s, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund announced a shift in the focus of their lending policies in Africa towards poverty reduction and invited public consultations to help define the strategy. Some hailed this as an innovative departure from the controversial macroeconomic policies the two institutions had previously emphasized in Africa.

"We welcome many, many of the changes they have brought about," UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) Secretary-General Rubens Ricupero noted in September, at the launch of an UNCTAD study of the new Bank/IMF policies in Africa. "We think it is good to centre their attention on poverty reduction." The shift in focus also has received considerable support from the donor community. Aid agencies are increasingly channelling their assistance through Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), the policy documents that seek to translate the approach into country programmes and projects.

But, notes Mr. Ricupero, close examination of PRSPs shows that the new approach has "not changed substantially" from the structural adjustment policies promoted in Africa by the Bank and the Fund since the 1980s.

The two institutions themselves have conceded that both governments and non-governmental organizations believe that PRSPs are not a major departure from the past. A joint study they released in March, A Review of the PRSP Approach, acknowledges a view common among critics: that even though national governments prepare the papers, they contain elements that national officials know the international financial institutions want anyway. NGOs "argue that PRSPs incorporate structural adjustment policies that ... have consistently failed," notes the Bank/IMF review, "... and this reflects the pressures on governments to conform to the policy expectations of the Bank and Fund."

Unemployed line up for jobs in Tanzania: Not many PRSPs explicitly address job creation.

Photo: ©UN / Betty Press

In theory, a PRSP is locally generated and "owned." A government, together with civil society organizations, prepares the document under World Bank and IMF supervision. The PRSP analyzes the causes, nature and incidence of poverty and defines how the country intends to reduce it, largely by increasing public spending on primary health care and basic education. Those programmes are mainly funded through savings on debt repayments under the enhanced Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative, but they also depend on financing from other sectors of national budgets and from donors.

This new focus on poverty alleviation follows two decades of adjustment policies in Africa that saw greater economic growth in some countries, but also rising poverty. According to World Bank figures, the number of people earning less than a dollar a day rose from 217 million in 1987 to 291 million by 1998.
Adjustment remains the focus
Largely in response to criticism of its policies, the IMF in 1999 announced its shift, symbolized by renaming its Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility (ESAF) as the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF). Around the same time, the World Bank introduced PRSPs, initially as the basis on which poor countries would receive debt relief under HIPC. Subsequently, the PRSP approach was extended to other low-income countries, and was turned into a condition to receive financial support from the Washington-based institutions. So far, 42 countries have completed either a full or an interim PRSP.

UNCTAD's study of African PRSPs, entitled From Adjustment to Poverty Reduction: What Is New?, concludes that not much has changed under the new approach. The two institutions have mainly built on conventional structural adjustment polices by adding two new elements:

Paying more attention to the need for public spending on education and health, reversing the tendency of early adjustment policies to reduce such spending.

Introducing "safety nets" and targeted spending programmes to mitigate the adverse impact of adjustment policies on the poor in education, health and rural infrastructure.

Although UNCTAD notes that the Washington institutions now realize that economic growth may not automatically trickle down to the poorest sectors of society, they are not recommending alternative macro-economic reforms. The Bank and the Fund still hold that structural adjustment policies are the necessary basis for sustained and rapid economic growth, the UNCTAD study argues. "What has not changed are the macro-economic policies," notes Mr Ricupero.

Mozambique's poverty reduction paper states that continued liberalization of foreign trade is a government priority in order to support rapid economic growth. In their PRSPs, Mauritania and Uganda intend to promote greater private sector participation in public services, which may jeopardize government subsidies for the provision of such services to poor communities. Mauritania indicates that it will privatize electricity and telecommunications.

While some of the policies recommended in PRSPs might by themselves alleviate poverty, in many countries they are being implemented alongside other, sometimes conflicting, policies. The London-based Panos Institute argues that the likely impact of Uganda's PRSP will not be large, since the country has 20 other loans worth about $1 bn; these loans come with their own sets of conditions over which the PRSP has no influence. Those conditions, reports Panos, "are likely to undermine the achievement of the PRSP goals." One such loan stipulates water privatization, which could undermine PRSP health goals by placing access to water out of reach of those who cannot pay market rates.
Pro-poor economic growth
Since many countries followed similar policy prescriptions before the advent of PRSPs -- with little evident success -- there is much debate about the wisdom of emphasizing economic growth through liberalization and rapid integration into the global economy.

In its PRSP review, UNCTAD argues that without massive, sustained capital injections into sub-Saharan Africa, high economic growth is not achievable. The agency notes that incomes in poor countries are too low to generate rapid economic growth and that many of these countries have no hope of attracting private capital unless they have mineral resources. Therefore, accelerating economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa would require a deliberate injection of at least an additional $10 bn annually for a decade.

And once economic growth is initiated, interventions to direct that growth towards poorer sections of African society would also be needed. "The key is the nature of growth," notes the African Learning Group on PRSPs, a forum of policymakers and experts organized by the UN Economic Commission for Africa. Above all, the group says, the benefits of growth must be shared equitably, through strategies that are explicitly pro-poor. Since the majority of Africa's poor live in rural areas, the group argues, efforts to improve their conditions should emphasize rural development, enhanced agricultural productivity and job creation.

School girls in Uganda: Improving education and health are central to poverty reduction.

Photo: ©UNICEF / HQ99-0121 / Pirozzi

Significantly, many PRSPs do not contain explicit pro-poor growth strategies. The Save the Children organization found that out of 22 PRSPs it surveyed, only around a quarter stated that growth strategies should be pro-poor. Another non-governmental organization, World Vision, has argued that for growth to be pro-poor, deliberate measures to redistribute wealth are needed. One such measure, land reform, is "almost studiously avoided within most PRSPs." In some PRSPs, policies inherited from structural adjustment programmes, such as user fees for basic social services, are still being promoted despite their adverse impact on the poor.

The Bank and IMF, however, expect that the conditions of poor people will improve through increased government spending on sectors such as education, health and rural infrastructure, traditionally regarded as important for poverty reduction. According to an IMF study, average spending on poverty reduction was estimated to increase from 7.7 per cent of GDP to 10.2 per cent between 1999 and 2002 in a sample of seven countries that completed their PRSPs.

Another aspect missing in many PRSPs is the need for strategies to deal with the growing social and economic threat posed by HIV/AIDS. In at least 10 low-income countries, one-third of all adults carry the HIV virus. The Bank/IMF PRSP review notes that a number of early PRSPs "were not fully successful in capturing the seriousness of the threat, or the link between poverty and AIDS."

African governments acknowledge the shortcoming. A 19-20 October African ministers conference in Johannesburg, South Africa, declared that given the prominence of AIDS, malaria and other infectious diseases as threats to African development, combating them must be part of the PRSP process.

Democratizing policy-making

The Bank and the Fund maintain that opening up the process to public debate and scrutiny is one of the major strengths of the PRSP approach. World Bank President James Wolfensohn says that while the process has not always worked perfectly, "there is strong evidence that it has created space for previously excluded voices."

Mr. Zie Gariyo of the Uganda Debt Network agrees that such consultations are a significant aspect of PRSPs. "The prescription of partnership between government and civil society is novel," he notes. "The majority of states have never regarded civil society as a stakeholder."

The Uganda Debt Network was the leading agency for civil society participation in the country's PRSP, which is often hailed by the Bank as a model. Uganda has an advantage over many other African countries, Mr. Gariyo believes, because the government had previously developed its own Poverty Eradication Action Plan through dialogue with civil society groups. That plan was then reformulated as a PRSP. A Civil Society Task Force, already set up under the earlier plan, consulted citizens, organized workshops, seminars, radio and television programmes and distributed policy briefs through the print media. Later, community representatives met to discuss the draft PRSP and make further recommendations.

"The significant point to note is that civil society inputs were sometimes wholly incorporated into the draft," says Mr. Gariyo. One such input was the call for greater emphasis on employment creation, which was missing in the initial draft version of the document -- a common absence in many African PRSPs. Thanks to the dialogue in Uganda, explicit measures for job creation were included in the agreed document.

Mr. Gariyo notes that the government provided considerable information and did not try to dictate the agenda of the civil society consultations. A Poverty Action Fund has been set up to channel debt savings and donor funds into programmes identified in the PRSP. Civil society groups will monitor the fund.

In Uganda, civil society groups also supported the government in opposing the traditional donor practice of directly funding projects in sectors of their choice. Development planners said this directed too much funding into certain areas at the expense of others. Together, the government and civil society groups prevailed on the donors to place their money into a general government budget for allocation to deserving under-funded areas.

However, Mr. Gariyo notes that this close cooperation did not extend to the preparation of the final version of the PRSP that the government presented to the Bank and IMF for approval. Civil society groups felt excluded from that stage.

Much more needs to be done

In many other African countries, the consultation process is only beginning or is fraught with greater difficulties. The PRSP Monitoring and Synthesis Project of the UK's Department for International Development notes that PRSPs often equate decentralization of government with greater and better participation. Yet in many countries, the institutional framework to allow local participation is lacking and there are no explicit links with local government.

Although parliament is theoretically the highest policy-making organ, the contribution of members of parliament in the development of Kenya's PRSP was disappointing, according to the non-governmental Action Aid. More than 60,000 Kenyans attended countrywide workshops and seminars during the formulation of the PRSP. But the big majority of MPs claimed to have other engagements even when the consultations were taking place in their own constituencies.

Ensuring that the PRSP process always includes civil society is difficult, especially in countries where the authorities perceive NGOs as being anti-government and put up barriers to their participation. In other cases, grassroots movements do not regard some civil society organizations as their genuine representatives, since they are either urban-based or driven by non-governmental groups from abroad.

In some countries, NGOs are frustrated because they do not view the PRSP as an opportunity to debate the underlying macro-economic framework. The call for participation implies debate at both macro- and micro-economic levels, but the Panos Institute notes that the Bank and IMF "appear for whatever reasons, not to be open to debate on the macro-economic issues."

In many cases, charges Ghanaian economist and activist Mr. Charles Abugre, participation of civil society in economic policy-making is strictly limited, and at times is used to endorse Bank and IMF policies and create an impression that NGOs support them.

"Sometimes the IMF and World Bank make all the important lending decisions for a government before a PRSP is finalized," says Mr. Abugre. A case in point is Tanzania. Its PRSP was submitted to the two institutions in November 2000, months after the country's lending programme already had been approved. "We wonder what purpose the full PRSP will serve in Tanzania," notes Mr Abugre.

Listening to the poor?

In 1999, World Bank researchers conducted interviews with 20,000 poor people in 23 countries to seek their views on poverty and learn about their problems and priorities. The Bank hoped that the study, Voices of the Poor: Crying Out for Change, would assist it to gain a deeper understanding of poverty and to refocus its policies on the needs of the poor.

UNCTAD's comparison between the demands of poor people in that report and some of the policy objectives in PRSPs show significant differences. Poor people told the Bank that they needed all school expenses lowered, but PRSPs typically call for reducing or eliminating primary school fees only, while recommending user fees at higher levels. The poor tend to oppose massive privatizations and challenge some of the practices of big business, while PRSPs endorse private sector-led development. The poor generally support land redistribution, lowering land rents and subsidizing basic inputs; they often oppose dismantling government-run cooperatives. But PRSPs push for the development of land markets and the elimination of marketing boards and subsidies. UNCTAD notes that in such areas, the preferences of the international financial institutions and national governments tend to prevail over those of the poor.

Despite the criticisms, PRSPs have generated a "welcome focus by policymakers" on the needs of the poor, says UN Development Programme Administrator Mark Malloch Brown. He adds, however, that the "overall process was in most cases overly concentrated on narrow economic issues."

The Bank and Fund emphasize that PRSPs are still in the early stages of implementation and that there is room for countries to improve both their content and their consultation mechanisms. "This is a long-term process," they note. "Quality will gradually have to improve over time."
PRSPs in funding dilemma
Faced with declining aid and unfavourable trade terms that erode the earning power of major African exports, many countries are expected to encounter financing shortfalls for poverty reduction. This creates problems in planning PRSP targets, making it difficult to predict the availability of financial resources. In their recent review of PRSPs, the Bank and IMF were critical of the first completed PRSPs, noting that none of them included contingencies in the event of financing shortfalls. "The presentation of a set of priority actions that are not yet fully financed and without contingency plans is a risk to the achievement of poverty reduction objectives," notes the Bank/IMF review.

Some observers charge that the amount of debt payments that will be saved under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative will be smaller than predicted, hampering spending for poverty alleviation. The level of these savings are determined on the basis of uncertain projections about economic growth and export earnings, especially since world prices have been falling for primary commodities, which account for the bulk of sub-Saharan African exports.

Even though most PRSPs depend on money saved from debt repayments, they also draw money from the general government budget. Financing problems are exacerbated when these budgets are highly dependent on external sources of funding, notes the African Learning Group on PRSPs, reporting that in Uganda's case, about 53 per cent of the budget comes from external loans and grants. Because such high levels of donor financing are often not sustained, governments are obliged to constantly revise their PRSP targets.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
At the end of the 1990s, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund announced a shift in the focus of their lending policies in Africa towards poverty reduction and invited public consultations to help define the strategy. Some hailed this as an innovative departure from the controversial macroeconomic policies the two institutions had previously emphasized in Africa.

# data[].attributes.headline
South Africa has the continent  biggest economy.

# data[].attributes.subject
South Africa has the continent  biggest economy.

# data[].attributes.headline
South African Unemployment Rate is 26.6%

# data[].attributes.subject
South African Unemployment Rate is 26.6%

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Do around 40,000 white families own 80% of the land in South Africa?

It is a claim that has been widely circulated since Andile Mngxitama, a Member of Parliament and "commissar for land and agrarian revolution" with the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), raised the issue in an open letter to business tycoon Richard Branson in May this year.

In Mngxitama's letter - written after the Virgin founder purchased a 40-hectare farm near Franschhoek in the Western Cape province - Branson's acquisition was described as "stolen land".

'Native majority are landless'

"The dominant idiom since 1652 is that of the settler, who imposed it upon the native majority through force of arms," Mngxitama wrote. "The result of this conquest is that, about 350 years later, the native majority is landless and only about 40,000 white families own up to 80% of our land."

Mngxitama later repeated the claim on Twitter, writing: " ‪#Land101 SA is constituted by 123-million hectares. 80% of SA land owned by only 40,000 white families. SA population [about] 53-million".

In a subsequent television debate with Cornelius Janse van Rensburg from the Afrikaans "business rights watchdog" AfriSake, the EFF's spokeswoman in Gauteng, Mandisa Mashego, was adamant that "80% of this country's land is deemed as agricultural land and 80% of that land is owned by 40,000 white families". Glaring, Janse van Rensburg responded: "It's nonsense, it's not so."

Can the claim be dismissed as nonsense, or is there some truth to it?

79% of SA in private hands

Mngxitama was emphatic when we spoke to him: "40,000 white families own 80% of the land. Deal with that." He said his claim was supported by a recent state land audit, data collected by Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) and research conducted bythe Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western-Cape.

Mashego did not respond to questions.

So what does the data tell us?

The state land audit, carried out by the office of South Africa's Chief Surveyor-General and published in 2013, did indeed find that 79% of South Africa's landmass was in private hands.

But that includes land owned by individuals, companies and trusts and all urban real estate as well as agricultural and mining land in South Africa.

Therefore, according to Mmuso Riba, the Chief Surveyor-General, "there is no basis" for the claim that whites own 80% of South Africa.

'Land ownership deeply skewed'

One possible source for Mashego's claim is a dataset on land utilisation that is still used by the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (DAFF) despite the fact that it is more than two decades old. The data was compiled by the Development Bank of Southern Africa in 1991. (According to the department's spokesman, Makenosi Maro, updated data will only be released towards the end of 2016.)

The 1991 dataset shows that 100,665,792 hectares - or 82.3% of South Africa's surface area - consisted of farmland. Of this, 81.9% (or 86,186,026 hectares) was considered commercial agricultural land. The rest - situated in what were formerly "black homelands" established under the auspices of the apartheid state - remains classified as "developing agriculture".

Prof. Cherryl Walker, professor of sociology at the University of Stellenbosch and author of Landmarked: Land Claims and Land Restitution in South Africa, prepared a fact sheet on land distribution for PLAAS last year.

According to Walker: "Land ownership is still deeply skewed along racial lines, but these figures [by the EFF] do not illuminate the current land dispensation."

One farmer, one farming unit?

Should the EFF's Mngxitama and Mashego be referring to 80% of farmland - and not 80% of South Africa's landmass - it is possible that the most recent census of commercial agriculture is the primary source of their claims. It was carried out seven years ago by Stats SA.

The census found that there were slightly fewer than 40,000 farming units, defined as "one or more separate farms in the same provinces that are farmed as a single unit".

Importantly, the census report explained: "The number of farming units... does not represent the number of farmers, as a specific farming unit can be operated by more than one farmer, and one farmer can operate more than one farming unit."

The census also did not reflect the racial composition of farm owners, nor the surface area of the farming units.

Small farms likely excluded

There is another caveat. For a farming unit to be included in the census it had to be registered for Value Added Tax (VAT). In South Africa it is compulsory to register for VAT when a business's turnover reaches a certain threshold. In the census year the bar was set at R300,000 over a twelve month period.

Peter O'Halloran, who writes on tax matters for Farmer's Weekly, says this would have excluded smallholdings surrounding the major cities and farms that are too small to make them economically viable.

"Commercial farms might number 40,000 or so according to the census, but in terms of land owners who own farms, this number could be much higher. VAT registration and compliance is highly onerous and the small operator will shy away from that.

"My take is that the smaller farmers and recreational farmers make up the majority of farmland owners in South Africa."

Unions join the fray

Of the farming units registered for VAT in 2007, only 39,966 were identified as "active" at the time of the census and included. The majority of farming units (33,249) were owned by individuals, with 2,167 belonging to companies, 2,259 to close corporations and 874 described as "family-owned".

How many are owned by black or white farmers? It is difficult to say for certain.

A Black Economic Empowerment (AgriBEE) scorecard - that measures elements such as black ownership and skills development - has been introduced for the agricultural sector. But the Agricultural Business Chamber (Agbiz) said in its latest survey report it is "very difficult to measure the BEE compliance of the agricultural sector as whole, as so few enterprises have determined their score, never mind obtained accredited scorecards".

Black or white?

Frustrated by pressure from legislators and politicians, agricultural unions have carried out land audits of their own. To date, two have been completed.

The KwaZulu-Natal Agricultural Union (Kwanalu) did not publicly release their audit so it cannot be independently assessed. Its CEO, Sandy la Marque, forwarded Africa Check a copy of a presentation which put white ownership at 15.4% of the province's surface area with the ownership of a further 23.11% listed as "unknown".

Agri Free State had their audit assessed by the Bureau for Food and Agricultural Policy (BFAP), a university based research network. They found that only 2.96% of commercial agricultural land in the province was black-owned. Another 10% could not be fully accounted for.

( Note: This is the case, for example, where land is owned by trusts or companies and it becomes virtually impossible to define ownership as either white of black. Free State Agri refers to the Anglo American Corporation, which has a BEE rating, but not necessarily an AgriBEE rating and is listed on foreign stock exchanges, but has significant domestic shareholding.)

To complicate matters further, both unions' counts of state-owned land are at odds with the state land audit.

The Surveyor-General said his office would refine their audit in time. At this stage they are surveying and registering land owned by the state. This includes a great number of schools, health facilities, police stations, vast tracks of land in the Eastern Cape and a significant chunk of the Kruger National Park - all of which were not previously recorded as state land.

Conclusion: The claim is incorrect

Claims that 40,000 white families own either 80% of South Africa, or 80% of the country's farmland, are incorrect and not supported by the available data.

Although a state land audit has shown that 79% of South Africa is privately owned, this includes land owned by individuals, companies and trusts, and includes all urban real estate and agricultural and mining land in South Africa. This would include land owned by both black and white South Africans.

It is also unlikely that the number of commercial farming units captured in the 2007 census - slightly less than 40,000 - reflects the true status of all commercial agricultural land in South Africa.

Certainly huge disparities remain and land ownership continues to be heavily skewed across racial lines twenty years after the end of apartheid.

But none of the datasets support the claims made by Mngxitama and Mashego. Given the inherent sensitivity of the land debate and the importance of land reform in South Africa, it is vital that debate around the issue and policy decisions is informed by accurate, current data.
Edited by Julian Rademeyer © Copyright Africa Check 2014. You may reproduce this report or content from it for the purpose of reporting and/or discussing news and current events, subject to providing a credit to "Africa Check a non-partisan organisation which promotes accuracy in public debate and the media. Twitter @AfricaCheck and www.africacheck.org".

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Do 40,000 whites own 80% of SA? The claim is incorrect - Africa Check

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Do around 40,000 white families own 80% of the land in South Africa? It is a claim that has been widely circulated since Andile Mngxitama, a Member of Parliament and "commissar for land and agrarian revolution" with the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), raised the issue in an open letter to business tycoon Richard Branson in May this year.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Under colonialism and apartheid, the ruling white minority stole vast amounts of land from black Africans in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Reclaiming this land became an important rallying cry for liberation movements in both countries; but in the years after white minority rule ended, it was extremely difficult for the new regimes to redistribute the land fairly and efficiently. In recent years, as the unaddressed land inequality in Zimbabwe became a pretext for President Robert Mugabe's demagoguery and led to Zimbabwe's demise, many observers have asked: Could South Africa be next?

When Nelson Mandela took power in South Africa in 1994, 87 percent of the country's land was owned by whites, even though they represented less than ten percent of the population. Advised by the World Bank, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) aimed to redistribute 30 percent of the land from whites to blacks in the first five years of the new democracy. By 2010 -- 16 years later -- only eight percent had been reallocated.

In failing to redistribute this land, the ANC has undermined a crucial aspect of the negotiated settlement to end apartheid, otherwise known as the liberation bargain. According to Section 25 of the new South African constitution, promulgated in 1994, existing property owners (who were primarily white) would receive valid legal title to property acquired under prior regimes, despite the potentially dubious circumstances of its acquisition. In exchange, blacks (in South Africa, considered to include people of mixed racial descent and Indians) were promised land reform. But the new government upheld only one side of the liberation bargain: South African whites kept their property, but blacks still have not received theirs. Political apartheid may have ended, but economic apartheid lives on.

THIS LAND IS OUR LAND

South Africa's failure to rectify its land inequality is like a sea of oil waiting for a match. In one of the most impressive public opinion studies ever conducted in the country, in 2009 the political scientist James Gibson surveyed 3,700 South Africans and found that 85 percent of

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When apartheid ended, the new regime in South Africa promised to redistribute land that whites had stolen from blacks. Yet nearly two decades later, it has largely failed to do so -- and the patience of the dispossessed is running out.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Afrikaans Suid-Afrika, officially Republic of South Africa, republic (2005 est. pop. 44,344,000), 471,442 sq mi (1,221,037 sq km), S Africa. It borders on the Atlantic Ocean in the west, on Namibia in the northwest, on Botswana and Zimbabwe in the north, on Mozambique and Swaziland in the northeast, and on the Indian Ocean in the east and south. Lesotho is an independent enclave in the east. The largest city is Johannesburg. Cape Town is the legislative capital, Pretoria the administrative capital, and Bloemfontein the judicial capital.

Land

Physical Geography

South Africa has three main geographic regions: a great interior plateau; an escarpment of mountain ranges that rims the plateau on the east, south, and west; and a marginal area lying between the escarpment and the sea. Most of the plateau consists of highveld, rolling grassland situated at 4,000 to 6,000 ft (1,220-1,830 m). In addition, in the northeast are the Witwatersrand (a ridge of rock where gold has been mined since 1886), the Bushveld Basin (a zone of savanna situated at 2,000-3,000 ft/610-910 m), and the Limpopo River basin.

In the north are the southern fringes of the Kalahari desert; and in the west is the semiarid Cape middleveld, which includes part of the Orange River and is situated at 2,500 to 4,000 ft (760-1,220 m). The escarpment reaches its greatest heights (10,000-11,000 ft/3,050-3,350 m) in the Drakensberg Mts. in the east. The marginal area varies in width between 35 and 150 mi (60-240 km) and most of it is bordered by a narrow, low-lying coastal strip. The region also includes considerable stretches of grassland in the east; mountains and the semiarid Great and Little Karroo tablelands in the south; and desert (a southern extension of the Namib desert) in the west. Kruger National Park is in NE South Africa.

Political Geography

South Africa is divided into nine provinces-Western Cape, Eastern Cape, Northern Cape, North West, Free State, KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng, Limpopo, and Mpumalanga. Before 1994, there were four provinces: Cape Province, Natal, Orange Free State, and Transvaal. In addition, during apartheid rule about 14% of the country's land area was set aside for blacks in pseudoindependent territories (originally called Bantustans), allegedly to allow them self-government and cultural preservation. In fact, these homelands were used to give the white government greater control and to exclude blacks from the political process. Gazankulu, Kangwane, KwaNdebele, KwaZulu, Lebowa, and QwaQwa were Bantu national homelands that existed under South African sovereignty. Transkei, the first homeland (1963), Bophuthatswana, Ciskei, and Venda were all granted independence by the early 1980s and existed as nominal republics, although none were recognized internationally. With the end of white minority rule in 1994, the black homelands were abolished.

People

The population of South Africa is 75% black (African) and 13% white (European), with about 9% people of mixed white, Malay, and black descent (formerly called Coloured), and 3% of Asian (mostly Indian) background. Although these ethnic divisions were rigidly enforced under the policy of apartheid [Afrikaans,=apartness], racial distinctions are often arbitrary. People of African descent fall into several groups, based on their first language.

South Africa has 11 official languages, nine of which are indigenous-Zulu, Xhosa, Tswana, Sotho, Swazi, Venda, Ndebele, Pedi, and Tsonga. Many blacks also speak Afrikaans (the first language of about 60% of the whites and the majority of those of mixed race) or English (the first language of most of the rest of the nonblacks). A lingua franca called Fanagalo developed in the mining areas, but it is not widely used today. About 68% of the population is Christian; major groups include the Dutch Reformed, Anglican, Methodist, Roman Catholic, and Zionist churches. Over 28% of the population follows traditional African religions, and there are small minorities of Muslims, Hindus, and Jews.

Economy

Until about 1870 the economy of the region was almost entirely based on agriculture. With the discovery of diamonds and gold in the late 19th cent., mining became the foundation for rapid economic development. In the 20th cent. the country's economy was diversified, so that by 1945 manufacturing was the leading contributor to the gross national product (GNP). By the 1990s, services contributed almost 60% of the GNP, while industry contributed over 35% and agriculture only about 5%. The economy is largely controlled by whites, but nonwhites make up more than 75% of the workforce. Working conditions and pay are often poor, and many nonwhites work as subsistence farmers.

South Africa has a limited amount of arable land (about 10%) and inadequate irrigation; production is diminished during periodic droughts. The chief crops grown are corn, wheat, sorghum, potatoes, peanuts, citrus fruits, cotton, tobacco, and sugarcane. In addition, large numbers of dairy and beef cattle, sheep, goats (including many Angora goats), and hogs are raised. There is a large fishing industry and much fish meal is produced.

The main industrial centers are Johannesburg, Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Durban, Pretoria, and Germiston. The principal manufactures include processed food, beverages (including wine), textiles, clothing, forest products, chemicals, iron and steel, metal products, machinery, and motor vehicles. South Africa is a world leader in the production of gold, diamonds, aluminosilicates, chromium, manganese, vanadium, and platinum. Other leading minerals extracted are copper ore, coal, asbestos, iron ore, silver, and titanium. Uranium is also mined.

The country has good road and rail networks. The chief seaports are Durban, Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, East London, Saldonha Bay, and Mossel Bay, where natural gas is now extracted offshore. The Orange River Project, a major hydroelectric and irrigation scheme, began in 1963 in central South Africa and was fully operational by the mid-1980s.

The main imports are machinery, transport equipment, consumer goods, chemicals, petroleum and petroleum products, industrial raw materials, and foodstuffs. The chief exports are manufactured goods, precious metals, chemicals, arms, foodstuffs, and diamonds. The principal trade partners are Germany, the United States, Great Britain, and Japan. South Africa carries on a large-scale foreign trade and generally maintains a favorable trade balance. It is a member of the Southern African Development Community.

Disapproval of apartheid policies and increasing social unrest among black South Africans in the 1970s and 80s led to the withdrawal of investments by some members of the international business community. A number of nations (European Union members, Japan, and the United States) imposed sanctions on South Africa, banning new investment and selected South African exports. These trends were reversed with the political changes of the 1990s. Tourism also began to make a comeback, and now contributes significantly to the economy.

Government

South Africa is a federal state. Until 1994 it was governed by the white minority with minimal mixed-race and Asian representation and virtually no black representation. In Apr., 1994, the country became a fully multiracial democracy, under an interim constitution; a permanent constitution was adopted in 1996. It provides for a strong central government headed by a president, who is elected by parliament for a five-year term and serves as both the chief of state and head of government. The bicameral parliament consists of a 400-member National Assembly, which is elected by proportional representation, and a 90-seat National Council of Provinces, which is elected by the nine provincial legislatures. Legislators serve five-year terms. The constitution contains an extensive bill of rights and provides for an independent judiciary; the 11-judge Constitutional Court is the highest court of appeal. Provinces are given exclusive powers in only a few areas, such as roads and recreation. The leading political parties are the African National Congress, the predominantly white Democratic Alliance, and the Zulu-based Inkhata Freedom party.

History

Early History

The San (Bushmen) are among the oldest indigenous peoples of South Africa. About 2,000 years ago, the pastoral Khoikhoi (called Hottentots by Europeans) settled mainly in the southern coastal region. By at least the 8th cent., Bantu speakers moving southward from E central Africa had settled the N region of present-day South Africa. These Bantu-speaking groups developed their own complex community organizations. In 1488, Bartolomeu Dias, a Portuguese navigator, became the first European to round the Cape of Good Hope (so named by King John II of Portugal). The diaries of shipwrecked Portuguese sailors attest to a large Bantu-speaking population in present-day KwaZulu-Natal by 1552.

Colonialism and African-European Relations

Although European vessels frequently passed by South Africa on their way to E Africa and India, and sometimes stopped for provisions or rest, no permanent European settlement was made until 1652, when Jan van Riebeeck and about 90 other persons set up a provisioning station for the Dutch East India Company at Table Bay on the Cape of Good Hope. Soon van Riebeeck began to trade with nearby Khoikhoi, gave Europeans land for farms, and brought in Africans (from W and E Africa) and Malays as slaves. By 1662, about 250 Europeans were living near the Cape and gradually they moved inland, founding Stellenbosch in 1679. In 1689 about 200 Huguenot refugees from Europe arrived; they established a wine industry and intermarried with the earlier Dutch settlers. By 1707 there were about 1,780 freeholders of European descent in South Africa, and they owned about 1,100 slaves.

By the early 18th cent., most San had migrated into inaccessible parts of the country to avoid European domination; the more numerous Khoikhoi either remained near the Cape, where they became virtual slaves of the Europeans, or dispersed into the interior. A great smallpox outbreak in 1713 killed many Europeans and most of the Khoikhoi living near the Cape. During the 18th cent. intermarriage between Khoikhoi slaves and Europeans began to create what became later known as the Coloured population. At the same time white farmers (known as Boers or Afrikaners) began to trek (journey) increasingly farther from the Cape in search of pasture and cropland.

By 1750 some farmers had migrated to the region between the Gamtoos and Great Fish rivers, where they encountered the Xhosa. At first the whites and blacks engaged in friendly trade, but in 1779 the first of a long series of Xhosa Wars (1789, 1799, 1812, 1819, 1834, 1846, 1850, 1877) broke out between them, primarily over land and cattle ownership. The whites sought to establish the Great Fish as the southern frontier of the Xhosa.

The British and the Boers

During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars the British replaced the Dutch at the Cape from 1795 to 1803 and again from 1806 to 1814, when the territory was assigned to Great Britain by the Congress of Vienna. In 1820, 5,000 British settlers were given small farms near the Great Fish River. They were intended to form a barrier to the southern movement of the Xhosa, but most soon gave up farming and moved to nearby towns such as Port Elizabeth and Grahamstown. They were the first large body of Europeans not to be assimilated into the Afrikaner culture that had developed in the 17th and 18th cent.

Great Britain alienated the Boers by remodeling the administration along British lines, by calling for better treatment of the Coloured and blacks who worked for the Boers as servants or slaves, by granting (Ordinance 50, 1828) free nonwhites legal rights equal to those of the whites, and by restricting the acquisition of new land by the Boers. In 1833 slavery was abolished in the British Empire, an act that angered South African slaveowners, but the freed slaves remained oppressed and continued to be exploited by white landowners.

To escape the restrictions of British rule as well as to obtain new land, about 12,000 Boers left the Cape between 1835 and 1843 in what is known as the Great Trek. The Voortrekkers (as these Boers are known) migrated beyond the Orange River. Some remained in the highveld of the interior, forming isolated communities and small states. A large group traveled eastward into what became Natal, where 70 Boers were killed (Feb., 1838) in an attack by Dingane's Zulu forces. Andries Pretorius defeated (Dec., 1838) the Zulu at the battle of Blood River, and the Boers proceeded to establish farms in Natal. After Britain annexed Natal in 1843, however, most of the Boers there returned to the interior. In the 1850s the Boer republics of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal were established. In 1860 the first indentured laborers from India arrived in Natal to work on the sugar plantations, and by 1900 they outnumbered the whites there.

Natural Riches and British Victory

Diamonds were discovered in 1867 along the Vaal and Orange rivers and in 1870 at what became (1871) Kimberley; in 1886 gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand. These discoveries (especially that of gold) spurred great economic development in S Africa during 1870-1900; foreign trade increased dramatically, rail trackage expanded from c.70 mi (110 km) in 1870 to c.3,600 mi (5,790 km) in 1895, and the number of whites rose from about 300,000 in 1870 to about 1 million in 1900.

At the same time there were complex political developments. In 1871 the British annexed the diamond-mining region (known as Griqualand West), despite the protests of the Orange Free State. Britain annexed the Transvaal in 1877 but, after a revolt, restored its independence in 1881. In 1889, Cape Colony and the Orange Free State joined in a customs union, but the Transvaal (led by Paul Kruger) adamantly refused to take part.

In 1890, Cecil J. Rhodes, an ardent advocate of federation in S Africa, became prime minister of Cape Colony, and by 1894 he was encouraging the non-Afrikaner whites (known as the Uitlanders) in the Transvaal to overthrow Kruger. In Dec., 1895, Leander Starr Jameson, a close associate of Rhodes, invaded the Transvaal with a small force, planning to assist a hoped-for Uitlander rising; however, the Uitlanders did not revolt, and Jameson was defeated by early Jan., 1896. Tension mounted in the following years as British Prime Minister Joseph Chamberlain and the British high commissioner in South Africa, Alfred Milner, supported the Uitlanders against the dominant Afrikaners. In 1896, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State formed an alliance, and in 1899 they declared war on Great Britain. The South African War (Boer War; 1899-1902) was won by the British.

The Union of South Africa

In 1910 the Union of South Africa, with dominion status, was established by the British; it included Cape of Good Hope, Natal, the Orange Free State, and the Transvaal as provinces. Under the Union's constitution, power was centralized; the Dutch language (and in 1925 Afrikaans) was given equal status with English, and each province retained its existing franchise qualifications (the Cape permitted voting by some nonwhites). After elections in 1910, Louis Botha became the first prime minister; he headed the South African party, an amalgam of Afrikaner parties that advocated close cooperation between Afrikaners and persons of British descent. In 1912, J. B. M. Hertzog founded the Afrikaner-oriented National party. By 1914, largely as a result of the efforts of Mohandas K. Gandhi, the Indians living there were receiving somewhat better treatment. Botha led (1914) South Africa into World War I on the side of the Allies and quickly squashed a revolt by Afrikaners who opposed this alignment.

In 1915, South African forces captured South West Africa (present-day Namibia) from the Germans, and after the war the territory was placed under the Union as a League of Nations mandate. In 1919, Botha was succeeded as prime minister by his close associate J. C. Smuts. In 1921-22 skilled white mine workers on the Witwatersrand, fearful of losing their jobs to lower-paid nonwhites, staged a major strike, which Smuts ended only with a use of force that cost about 230 lives. As a result, Hertzog was elected prime minister in 1924 and remained in office until 1939; from 1934 to 1939 he was supported by Smuts, with whom he formed the United South African National party.

Hertzog led an Afrikaner cultural and economic revival; was influential in gaining additional British recognition of South African independence (through the Balfour Declaration of 1926 and the Statute of Westminster of 1931); took (Dec., 1932) South Africa off the gold standard, thus raising the price of gold and stimulating the gold-mining industry and the economy in general. He also curtailed the electoral power of nonwhites and furthered the system of allocating reserved areas for blacks as their permanent homes, at the same time regulating their movement in the remainder of the country.

The Smuts-Hertzog alliance disintegrated over whether to support Great Britain in World War II. Winning a crucial vote in parliament (Sept., 1939), Smuts became prime minister again and brought South Africa into the war on the British (Allied) side; Hertzog, who was not alarmed by Nazi German aggression and had little affection for Great Britain, went into opposition. South African troops made an important contribution to the Allied war effort, helping to end Italian control in Ethiopia and fighting with distinction in Italy and Madagascar.

National Party Ascendancy and Apartheid

The National party won the 1948 elections, partly by criticizing the more liberal policy toward nonwhites associated with Jan Hofmeyr, Smuts's close aide. D. F. Malan of the National party was prime minister from 1948 to 1954, and he was followed by J. G. Strijdom (1954-58), H. F. Verwoerd (1958-66), B. J. Vorster (1966-78), and P. W. Botha (1978-89)-all members of the National party, which won the general elections between 1953 and 1979. These governments greatly strengthened white control of the country. The policy of apartheid in almost all social relations was further implemented by a varied series of laws that included additional curbs on free movement (partly through the use of passbooks, which most blacks were required to carry) and the planned establishment of a number of independent homelands for African ethnic groups.

Black South Africans had long protested their inferior treatment through organizations such as the African National Congress (ANC; founded 1912) and the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union of Africa (founded 1919 by Clements Kadalie). In the 1950s and early 60s there were various protests against the National party's policies, involving passive resistance and the burning of passbooks; in 1960 a peaceful protest against the pass laws organized by the Pan-Africanist Congress (an offshoot of the ANC) at Sharpeville (near Johannesburg) ended when police opened fire, massacring 70 protesters and wounding about 190 others. In the 1960s most leaders (including ANC leader Nelson Mandela) of the opposition to apartheid were either in jail or were living in exile, and the government proceeded with its plans to segregate blacks on a more permanent basis.

The Republic of South Africa and Racial Strife

In 1961, South Africa left the Commonwealth of Nations (whose members were strongly critical of South Africa's apartheid policies) and became a republic. The first president of the new republic was C. R. Swart; he was succeeded by T. E. Donges and J. J. Fouché. In the 1960s there were international attempts to wrest South West Africa from South Africa's control, but South Africa tenaciously maintained its hold on the territory. In 1966, Prime Minister Verwoerd was assassinated by a discontented white government employee. From the late 1960s, the Vorster government began to try to start a dialogue on racial and other matters with independent African nations; these attempts met with little success, except for the establishment of diplomatic relations with Malawi and the adjacent nations of Lesotho, Botswana, and Swaziland, all of which were economically dependent on South Africa.

South Africa was strongly opposed to the establishment of black rule in the white-dominated countries of Angola, Mozambique, and Rhodesia, and gave military assistance to the whites there. However, by late 1974, with independence for Angola and Mozambique under majority rule imminent, South Africa, as one of the few remaining white-ruled nations of Africa, faced the prospect of further isolation from the international community. In the early 1970s increasing numbers of whites (especially students) protested apartheid, and the National party itself was divided, largely on questions of race relations, into the somewhat liberal verligte [Afrikaans,=enlightened] faction and the conservative verkrampte [Afrikaans,=narrow-minded] group.

In the early 1970s, black workers staged strikes and violently revolted against their inferior conditions. South Africa invaded Angola in 1975 in an attempt to crush mounting opposition in exile, but the action was a complete failure. In 1976, open rebellion erupted in the black township of Soweto near Johannesburg as a protest against the requirement of the use of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in black schools. Over the next months rioting spread to other large cities of South Africa, resulting in the deaths of more than 600 blacks. In 1977, the death of black leader Steve Biko in police custody (and under suspicious circumstances) prompted protests and sanctions.

After Botha became prime minister in 1978, he pledged to uphold apartheid as well as improve race relations. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the government granted independence to four homelands: Transkei (1976), Bophuthatswana (1977), Venda (1979), and Ciskei (1981). In the early 1980s, as the regime hotly debated the extent of reforms, it launched military strikes on the exiled ANC and other insurgent groups in neighboring countries, including Lesotho, Mozambique, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Zambia.

In 1984, a new constitution was enacted which provided for a tricameral parliament. The new Parliament included the House of Representatives, comprised of Coloureds; the House of Delegates, comprised of Indians; and the House of Assembly, comprised of whites. This system left the whites with more seats in the Parliament than the Indians and Coloureds combined. Blacks violently protested being shut out of the system, and the ANC, which had traditionally used nonviolent means to protest inequality, began to advocate more extreme measures as well.

A Regime Unravels

As attacks against police stations and other government installations increased, the regime announced (1985) an indefinite state of emergency. In 1986, Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu, a black South African leader, addressed the United Nations and urged further sanctions against South Africa. A wave of strikes and riots marked the tenth anniversary of the Soweto uprising in 1987. In 1989, President Botha fell ill and was succeeded, first as party leader, then as president, by F. W. de Klerk. De Klerk's government began relaxing apartheid restrictions, and in 1990, Nelson Mandela was freed after 27 years of imprisonment and became head of the recently legalized ANC.

In late 1991 the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA), a multiracial forum set up by de Klerk and Mandela, began efforts to negotiate a new constitution and a transition to a multiracial democracy with majority rule. In Mar., 1992, voters in a referendum open only to whites endorsed constitutional reform efforts by a wide margin. However, there was continuing violence by opponents of the process, especially by supporters of Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, leader of the Zulu-based Inkatha movement, with the backing and sometimes active participation of South African security forces. There were also reprisals by supporters of the ANC and the Pan-Africanist Congress. In Sept., 1992, government-backed black police fired on a crowd of ANC demonstrators in Ciskei, killing 28. In Apr., 1993, the secretary-general of the South African Communist party was murdered by a right-wing extremist.

The New South Africa

Despite obstacles and delays, an interim constitution was completed in 1993, ending nearly three centuries of white rule in South Africa and marking the end of white-minority rule on the African continent. A 32-member multiparty transitional government council was formed with blacks in the majority. In Apr., 1994, days after the Inkatha Freedom party ended an electoral boycott, the republic's first multiracial election was held. The ANC won an overwhelming victory, and Nelson Mandela became president. South Africa rejoined the Commonwealth in 1994 and also relinquished its last hold in Namibia, ceding the exclave of Walvis Bay.

In 1994 and 1995 the last vestiges of apartheid were dismantled, and a new national constitution was approved and adopted in May, 1996. It provided for a strong presidency and eliminated provisions guaranteeing white-led and other minority parties representation in the government. De Klerk and the National party supported the new charter, despite disagreement over some provisions; Inkatha followers had walked out of constitutional talks and did not participate in voting on the new constitution. Shortly afterward, de Klerk and the National party quit the national unity government to become part of the opposition, after 1998 as the New National party. The new government faced the daunting task of trying to address the inequities produced by decades of apartheid while promoting privatization and a favorable investment climate.

A Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1996-2003), headed by Archbishop Tutu, sought to establish the truth about atrocities committed during the country's apartheid era, while avoiding the expense and divisiveness of trials. The commission's final report said the apartheid government had institutionalized violence in its fight against racial equality but was also critical of most of the groups involved in the liberation struggle, including the ANC. By the end of the 1990s, many blacks had entered the middle class, often through government jobs. Unemployment remained critically high, however, and crime and labor unrest were on the rise. In the 1999 elections Thabo Mbeki, who had succeeded Mandela as head of the ANC, led the party to a landslide victory and became South Africa's new president. The liberal Democratic party became the leading opposition party, and in 2000 it joined with the New National party to form the Democratic Alliance (DA). That coalition, however, survived only until late 2001, when the New National party left it to form a coalition with the ANC.

The end of apartheid led as well to a reemergence of South Africa on the international stage, particularly in Africa. The country has become active in the African Union (the successor of the Organization of African Unity) and the nonaligned movement, and has helped broker peace agreements in strife-torn Burundi (2001) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (2002). In Apr., 2002, the small Federal Alliance party joined the Democratic party in the Democratic Alliance; and in Nov., 2003, the Alliance agreed to form a coalition with Inkatha against the ANC in the 2004 elections. AIDS has become a significant health problem in South Africa, and in late 2003 the government finally agreed to provide a comprehension anti-AIDS prevention and treatment program through the public health system.

Parliamentary elections in Apr., 2004, resulted in a resounding victory for the ANC, which won nearly 70% of the vote; the DA remained the largest opposition party and increased its share of the vote. The new parliament subsequently reelected President Mbeki. As a result of its poor showing, the New National party merged with the ANC, and voted to disband in Apr., 2005. In June, Mbeki dismissed Deputy President Jacob Zuma after Zuma's financial adviser was convicted of paying the deputy president bribes. The ANC, however, refused to remove Zuma from his deputy party leadership post, even after he was arraigned on corruption charges later in the month; he was formally indicted in November. In Dec., 2005, Zuma was also charged with rape in an unrelated case, and suspended his participation in the ANC leadership for the duration of that case. After his acquittal on the rape charge in May, 2006, he resumed his ANC duties; the corruption case was dismissed in Sept., 2006, for procedural reasons.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Afrikaans Suid-Afrika, officially Republic of South Africa, republic (2005 est. pop. 44,344,000), 471,442 sq mi (1,221,037 sq km), S Africa. It borders on the Atlantic Ocean in the west, on Namibia in the northwest, on Botswana and Zimbabwe in the north, on Mozambique and Swaziland in the northeast, and on the Indian Ocean in the east and south.