The author notes that it's "obviously bad" that inequality is so high in South Africa.
I may be inadvertently challenging some orthodoxy here but why is that?
The author also notes that around 1/4 of working age people contribute tax revenue. Would the rest really be better off without the top X% of taxpayers, other things being equal?
I think implicit in this critique is that the reader should think anything less than maintaining a western European standard of living is a failure on the government's part.
But South Africa's GDP PPP per capita is around that of Mongolia or Egypt, while one might think from reading this article that South Africa is a "temporary embarrassed" western European country.
The country has a lot of problems, but if you frame it like that one could view the status quo as a resounding success. While traveling there I ran into a lot of immigrants from countries to the north that migrated there for a better life.
I've read a few articles about South Africa with a similar tone, but they never really seem to get to the point.
Yes the ANC is corrupt, but even if you suppose the country were run with Swiss efficacy you're begging the question about what a $15,000 GDP PPP per capita version of Switzerland would look like.
The answer is likely to me much closer to Mongolia than Switzerland in terms of basic services, infrastructure etc