Inequality dialogue disrupted at UCT

Siyavuya Mzantsi

A DIALOGUE at UCT on income, wealth and persistent inequality was disrupted when a group of Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) members stormed the Jameson Hall, chanting, singing and shouting that it was “highly hypocritical” that the university’s management celebrated what the group called economic dispossession and economic inequality.

The dialogue eventually continued after the group was given three minutes to make their statement.

Yesterday’s dialogue was hosted at UCT with the Nelson Mandela Foundation and The Mandela Initiative in partnership with CPUT, Stellenbosch University (SU) and UWC.

It preceded the 13th Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture to be addressed by world-renowned French economist Professor Thomas Piketty in Johannesburg on Saturday. However, Piketty was unable to fly to South Africa to deliver his lecture at UCT yesterday because he did not have sufficient pages in his passport.

Nelson Mandela Foundation chairperson Professor Njabulo Ndebele said the dialogue marked the beginning of a series of talks in support of the 13th Nelson Mandela Lecture.

“The evidence is overwhelming that finding sustainable solutions in South Africa, wherever they might be, is fundamentally undermined by the crippling levels of poverty and inequalities and they are distinguished by familiar apartheid socio-economic patternings that are deeply structured in our society,” he said.

Deputy Dean in the faculty of law at UCT, Associate Professor Debbie Collier, Professor Olajide Oloyede, of the department of anthropology and sociology at UWC, and Kholekile Malindi, a lecturer in the department of economics at SU, were panellists.

Collier said wages, wealth and persistent inequality lay at the heart of the Marikana massacre.

“In 2015, these troubled relationships remain as revealed by the perceptions of our business leader – captured manually in the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness report.

“After reflecting on the Marikana massacre, Piketty concludes that without a real right to intervene in corporate decision-making, including seats on the company’s board of directors, transparency is of little use.”