DESPITE ECONOMIC growth of 5 per cent a year in South Africa for the past decade, the country's cities "are the most unequal in the world", according to a United Nations report on inequality among urban dwellers.
UN-Habitat's latest State of the World's Citiesreport, which is published every two years, says even though local governments have tried to redistribute wealth, efforts to bridge the gap between rich and poor have mostly failed.
UN-Habitat executive director Anna Tibaijuka said at the report's publication last week that urban inequalities were increasing and becoming more entrenched in South Africa, "which suggests failures in wealth distribution are largely the result of structural or systemic flaws". She added: "South Africa stands out as a country that has yet to break out of an economic and political model that concentrates resources, although the adoption of redistributive strategies and policies in recent years have reduced inequalities slightly."
Historically, the gap between haves and have-nots in South Africa has been wide due to the apartheid regime, which for decades enriched the country's white population at the expense of black and Indian co-inhabitants.
But a new study on eight of Johannesburg's most deprived communities reveals that, despite the creation of a three million-strong black middle class since 1994, the majority remain in poverty. The Johannesburg Urban Poverty and Livelihoods Study showed that, of 1,409 households surveyed in late 2007, 51 per cent of residents earned less than 1,600 rand (€115) a month and one in five had no income at all.
According to housing and land researcher Jean du Plessis, one of the legacies of apartheid has been the rapid urbanisation of South Africa's cities. UN statistics put the urban population at 58 per cent, with 33 per cent of these living in slums and squatter camps.
Mr du Plessis said city managers had focused too much on the provision of formal subsidised housing as the solution - a slow, limited process. "In the meantime, hundreds of thousands of families have ended up living in informal settlements," he said.
"In my view, the starting point should have been providing security of tenure to city dwellers, and to follow that up with intensive development support."