I'm Jane Thandi Lipman, filmmaker and journalist, and I recently attended the Nelson Mandela Annual lecture addressed by economist Professor Thomas  Piketty with my mother, Beata Lipman, veteran anti apartheid activist and scriber of the Freedom Charter. I thought that subscribers might be interested in hearing what PIketty had to say. 

This is a transcript of his address to the 13th Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture, which took place at the University of Johannesburg's Soweto campus on 3 October 2015 as supplied by the Nelson Mandela Foundation.

"Thank you for your very warm welcome. Let me first apologise for the fact that my English sounds like French. Let me start by saying how honoured and moved I am to be here today for this Nelson Mandela Lecture.

For everybody from my generation, from around the world,  South Africa and Nelson Mandela, of course, has a universal meaning. I was born in 1971 and when I was a teenager, South Africa was, of course, one of the very important countries that I was always hearing about. When I became an adult in 1989 in Paris, we were commemorating the 200th anniversary of the French revolution. But what was really important, what was going on elsewhere, was the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of apartheid, with the liberation of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and the end of apartheid in the following years.

Being here today 25 years later is something which I find very moving and very strong and I am very honoured and grateful to the Foundation for inviting me.

Of course, now that we are 25 years after the fall of apartheid, we are all puzzled by the fact that inequality is not only still very high in South Africa, but has been rising and, in some way, income inequality is even higher today than 20 years ago, which is extremely puzzling for all of us. This is something we want to better understand.

We also know from history called experience, that extreme inequality of the kind of levels we observe in South Africa is not good for development and growth, and it can also lead to violent reactions and violent events. We all have in mind the very violent episodes at Marikana three years ago, and we know from historical experience that if inequality is not addressed through peaceful means and peaceful democratic institutions it’s always potentially a source for violence. And, of course, this can happen again.

So, what I’d really like to do in this lecture is to try to see what we can learn from the historical experience of other countries with inequality in order to better analyse future opportunities for countries like South Africa, but more generally for the world issue of inequality.

Let me say right away, and I will speak more about this, the fact that inequality today in some dimensions is higher in South Africa than what it was 20 years ago in terms of concentration of income. It’s partly due to international factors which are not completely under the control of the South African government. I will come back to this later. I think the international community broadly speaking has a big responsibility for the situation of inequality in South Africa, in Africa and the world and some of the solutions will have to come from the international community.

But it is not enough to just blame international factors. I think that there are also deeper reasons for the fact that reduction of inequality, the South African revolution so to speak, did not deliver as much as one might have expected.  Generally speaking, I would say the general reason is that equality and formal rights and basic civil rights – even though it is of course very important the right to move in your country, the right to take all possible occupations, at least in theory, the right to vote – all these formal civil rights are extremely important, but equality and formal rights are not sufficient to reach real equality.

So if you want effective rights to move, it’s not enough to be formally allowed to go to other parts of the country. If you cannot pay rent or housing to go where the jobs are, it affects the right to move, it remains a very limited right.

More generally I would argue that we now need to think harder about how to secure effective rights, including the right to work for a decent wage, the right to good quality education, the right to have access to good property, and finally, and maybe most importantly, the right to real economic and political democracy including sharing of economic power in companies and participatory governance in the public and private sector.

In this presentation I’m going to make three different points. In the first part I will try to put the issue of inequality into historical perspective, and see what we can learn from the history called experiences with the reduction of inequality in different countries. Then the second point will be about a solution for reducing inequality in South Africa, that we can draw from historical experiences, and the third part of the lecture will be about the global response to inequality and the need for international action.

Let me first start with history and the historical perspective. I think it’s important because there’s a lot of historical amnesia in the world sometimes about inequality, and I think it’s important to take this broad historical and comparative perspective.

As a scholar and academic, my work has been primarily the work of a historian, trying to collect historical data on inequality and wealth. I should stress that this was only possible through a very collective research project. I started working on the inequality of income and wealth in France about 15 years ago, but then I was very fortunate to find many collaborators in many countries – Anthony Atkinson in Britain, who also worked on the case of South Africa; Emmanuel Saez in the US, who also worked on Japan and Canada; Facundo Alvaredo in Argentina, Chile and Mexico; Abhijit Banerjee in India.

I cannot make a complete list, but it is really a very international, global collective research programme that is continuing. I should stress that we still know too little about inequality. We know a little bit more than we used to, and I will try to share some of the lessons that we have learned, but we still know too little.

We are in the social sciences – there are different ways to interpret history, and our objective is not to come with ready-to-apply solutions or a “magic bullet”, but rather to contribute to a more informed democratic discussion about inequality, and ultimately the objective is surely that everybody, normal citizens, can look at this data, look at the book written from this data and make their own opinion, because these issues are too important to be left to a small group of experts.

I think it’s wrong to believe economists like to treat science and their field and economic science, as [being] so sophisticated that the rest of the world cannot understand. But of course this is a big joke.

What’s important is not to let economists do that; I think it is important to realise that issues of inequality, income, wealth, capital, public debt are not technical issues – these are issues in which everybody must have an opinion because ultimately they are what determine political change.

So if you look at this historical database that we have collected, probably the most important finding is that we cannot simply rely on market forces and “trickle-down” mechanisms in order to deliver the right level of inequality.

There is a very optimistic theory of economic development, which at some point was described as the Theory of the Kuznet’s Curve, according to which you have a natural reduction of inequality in advanced stages of development. This theory is just wrong if you take [into account] these very broad international perspectives that we have taken in our research.

In particular, one very important finding is that if you look at the reduction of inequality that happened during the first half of the 20th century in North America, in Europe or in Asia, you can see that this has nothing to do with natural, process-based market forces.

It is due, to a large extent to the very violent shocks of World War I, the Great Depression, World War II and most importantly, to the new policies, the new social policies, welfare state policies, new fiscal policies, progressive taxation that were finally accepted by the elites after these violent shocks and also after the Bolshevik Revolution, which put strong pressures on the elite in Western countries to accept reforms, which until 1914 and World War I were refused.

Now that is a very important lesson. In particular, this is particularly striking from my own country France to see that until 1914, until World War I – you actually have a rising concentration of wealth, with a level of concentration of wealth which was probably finishing higher than a century before or 130 years before the Ancien Regime under the French Revolution.

This is very striking for several reasons, first because at that time in 1910, 1900, 1914, the French Republican elite – financial, economic and political elite – were in very strong denial of this, and basically they were saying, “No, this cannot be possible because we have a major French revolution, so this is enough, we are now are a country of equals, we don’t need aristocrats any more, we have equal formal rights, we have the right to move, the right to take a new occupation, the right to property, the right to vote, at least for man at that time, and therefore we are a country of equals.”

So, for instance, we don’t need progressive taxation, and it’s very interesting to see that France – you know, France sometimes likes to portray itself as a country of equality, but you know there is always a lot of hypocrisy with all these kind of statements about a “country of equality”, “country of opportunity”. You know, elites have a lot of imagination for self-serving statements in order to justify the system from which they benefit.

In the end, France was actually the last country to create an income tax in the summer of 1914, and this was not to pay for education and for schools, this was to pay to go to war with Germany. And other countries had already created the income tax before, the US in 1913, Britain in 1908, Prussia, Japan, Sweden in 1880, 1890. France was the very last one within the developed countries to create an income tax. What is interesting is to understand why; it is because there was this feeling among the elite that: “Well, we’ve done the French Revolution, we don’t have aristocrats, we are a country of equals and we don’t need progressive taxation. Britain, of course, will need progressive taxation because they have all this aristocracy, this Queen and this concentrated land, so they should create progressive tax right away. But in France we don’t need it because we have done the French Revolution.”

So that is interesting, first, for historical reasons, also because we can see that the elites have a lot of imagination to justify their position. It is also interesting because this failure of the French Revolution, which is sort of the bourgeois revolution par excellence which gave equal rights before 1789, before the French Revolution a small group of aristocrats, which were about 1% of the population, had a very privileged right regarding the fiscal system, regarding political rights.

There were also restrictions to mobility within the country and to the kind of occupation you can take depending on your social origins, so there were privileges in the country and at that time, the hope during the French Revolution was that, if we have equal rights to take all occupation to move equal rights to property then this should be enough to bring a country of equals. And the fact that it doesn’t work this way, and that in fact over the course of the 19th century and in the earlier 20th century we get to a concentration of wealth that is in some ways even higher than under the Ancien Regime, is very interesting because it shows probably one of the deep reasons that I try to explain in my research. It is that the fact of being a republic rather than a monarchy doesn’t really change the deep economic mechanisms through which concentration of wealth is working; and in particular the fact that all over the 19th century you have a rate of return to capital that is markedly higher than the growth rate of the economy – 4, 5, 6%  per year for the new capital investment in the manufacturing sector, as compared to a gross rate of 1 or 2% per year, well this gap between the two can explain to a large extent why we continue with the very large concentration of wealth until World War I.

So it’s only very violent shocks which occurred in the 20th century which finally convinced the elite to accept a number of fiscal and social reforms that were not adopted before.

I think this is of interest to South Africa, because, of course, I don’t want to compare the French revolution and the South African revolution; it’s completely a different context, and in a way the inequality regime that existed under apartheid was much more oppressive and violent than the Ancien Regime in France.

The group that had more rights than the rest of the population, namely the whites, was much bigger. It was not 1% of the population; it was 10-15%, so that’s more difficult to deal with a situation like this than if it’s 1%. The difference of colour of skin is also important because when everybody is white in France, you can sort of forget a couple of generations later who comes from what group, which is more difficult with the colour of skin.

It’s a trivial remark, but it makes a big difference in the long run, you know, in order to move ahead and solve this kind of situation.

And finally, the repression of basic rights which was happening under apartheid was much more violent with restrictions to mobility and we had a reference to this and expulsion [referring to previous speech] and the very strong territorial discrimination, which did not really exist in France in the 18th century, and which in some ways looked more like the serfdom systems that we had a couple of centuries before.

So, the challenges, the system from which South Africa comes from is, in a way, a much more oppressive inequality system than France and the Ancien Regime, and that another reason why formal, equal rights is not sufficient to bring equality. One of the lessons I draw from this part of my lecture is that we need more than formal, equal rights – rights to move, rights to take occupations – that is important, but that’s not enough.

So now, let me now turn to the issue of inequality in South Africa today and what kind of response to reduce inequality we can think of.

First, what do we know about the level of inequality in South Africa, how it has changed since the fall of apartheid and how this has compared to other countries?

We know too little, in particular, wealth concentration, but everything we know suggests an unusually high level of inequality, higher than what we observed pretty much anywhere else in the world, so just to take one number number which I find particularly striking – if we use South African income tax data, together with a national accounts household survey, and we do the same for other countries, we find that the share of total income going to the top 10% income earners in South Africa currently right now is between 60 and 65% of total income for the top 10%.

Just to make comparison, in Brazil, using similar data we are between 50 and 55%. In the US, we are between 45 and 50%, and in most European countries we are between 30 and 35%. South Africa is really at the top of the class, so to speak, and is in a way, way out of the experience that we can see.

Now if we try to explain this, some people say well that’s because we have very high unemployment. Certainly, high unemployment is a big, big problem to solve and to address in South Africa, but I don’t think this can explain this extremely and unusually high level of inequality. I think unemployment is more a symptom of inequality and equal skills and equal distribution across the territories, where people cannot move to where the jobs are and have not have access to the right skills.

But this in itself can’t explain such a high level of income concentration. Just to take an example, there are other countries in the world unfortunately where you have very high unemployment – Spain or Greece, where you also have a 25% rate of unemployment – and you don’t have that level of income inequality. You still have 30-35% of total income to the top 10% as compared to 60-65% in South Africa. So even if the data is not perfect, I think it’s very clear that the extreme level of inequality we have in South Africa is much more than just unemployment. It has to do, certainly, with the legacy of apartheid. In particular, it is striking to see what is really different in South Africa compared to other countries is the top 10% share – if you take the top 1% share it is not so different from the US today, but if you take the top 10% share, then it’s really higher in South Africa. So this really suggests that you have a relatively large group in the country, around 10%, which is very far away from the rest of the population.                 

Of course, this group historically has been predominantly, almost exclusively, white. Even today if you look at the data, especially within the top 1-5%, it will be up to 80% white, so things have changed a little bit, but we are still are very much with this same structure of racial inequality that we used to have. So now how can we make progress? Let me make it clear that I’m not here to give lessons to South Africa, I am trying to see what we can learn from historical experience.

Certainly, the international context has played a role in rising inequality in South Africa since the 1990s. Let me mention a number of reasons.

Certainly, financial deregulation, which has happened over the world in the past 25 years, has contributed to rising inequality. More generally,  the fall of communism around 1990 has opened the way for a new era, an unlimited phase in self-regulated markets, and in some cases it has clearly gone too far. Financial deregulation is one example and this has contributed to the rise of financial fragility, and which eventually contributed to the financial crisis of 2008.

More generally, if you have globalisation without proper regulation – globalisation in itself can be a powerful force to reduce inequality at a world level – but if you don’t have proper regulation at the same time, in particular, regarding taxation, this can contribute to rising inequality. Also rising commodity prices, of course has contributed to rising top income shares in South Africa.

But, it will not be enough just to blame these international factors.

I think there are domestic solutions to the inequality in South Africa, so as I already said, there are four areas of rights where we need to turn to a policy of effective rights – rights to labour, work for a decent wage, right to high-quality education, right of access to property, and right to economic and political democracy.

So let me say just a bit more about these four rights.

Regarding right to work for a decent wage. I think the discussions that South Africa is having right now about the introduction of a national minimum wage is extremely important and I think from this historical and comparative experience, I have, in my view, if we are able to find the right level of the national minimum wage then definitely South Africa could and should introduce the national minimum wage.

There are countries in the world, not only in the rich world, but also emerging countries like Brazil, who have a national minimum wage, who were able to find the right level for the national minimum wage, although these are much bigger countries than South Africa, with 200-million inhabitants, a lot of geographic disparity, and I think that South Africa should be able to find the right level for the national minimum wage. This is a way to avoid situation of extreme exploitation of low-skilled workers, particularly in areas of limited opportunity to move. Now this in itself is not going to solve the key problem, which is the inability to access higher-paying jobs, and so here is a second important effective right that needs to be strengthened.

It’s the right to high-quality education together with the right to adequate public infrastructure, including transportation infrastructure. Regarding public education, I think it is fair to say that the quality of public, primary education and junior and secondary education that is available to the most disadvantaged groups in this country is not satisfactory, and that this should be a national priority and a lot of progress could be made in this direction.

I understand that many people, in particular many business leaders that I have met in recent days, are very sceptical about the capacity of the government to deliver this, but on the other hand I think there is no other option than to try to improve the functioning and to contribute, to pay the tax that we need in order to finance this public sector of education. There’s no other strategy according to which we could do it, through privatising the education system and letting the business sector do it. I think it will not work; I think what has worked in history, in order to have sustainable and equitable growth is to have a well-functioning public education and health system, and South Africa should go in this direction.

The third, effective right which I want to stress is the right to property. So that is probably one of the more complicated rights because it involves very difficult and sensitive issues, including land reform. Let me just say that if we take a broad international historical perspective, we see in many countries, in history, much more ambitious land reforms than what we have seen in South Africa since the end of apartheid; I think it’s fair to say that black economic empowerment strategies, which were mostly based on voluntary market transactions, [and or not] market values were not that successful in spreading the wealth and limiting the extreme concentration of wealth from which we start in South Africa. So I think we need to think again about more ambitious land reform.

I also think that like many other countries, but maybe even more than other countries, South Africa will benefit from increased transparency about wealth and about who owns what in South Africa.

I think it is very difficult to have a reasonable democratic conversation about wealth with so little information, so in particular people talk about BEE policies and their impact, but in fact there is very little data in fact on wealth. That’s partly because access to the estate tax data is extremely difficult, to say the least, in South Africa. So there is an estate tax but it is very difficult to know how many taxpayers transmitted wealth between R1- to R2-million or R10-million to 20-million, year after year. Most importantly, even if this data was available this would only be information about wealth at death, and wealth of the living is even more interesting than wealth at death, in a way. I think it would be important and absolutely possible for South Africa to introduce an annual tax on net wealth – a progressive annual tax on net individual wealth, even if it comes with a very low tax rate to begin with. For example,  zero percent for R1-million in wealth, 0.1% between R1- and 10-million and 0.5% above R10-million – I’m just putting numbers so that people have an idea.

I think even with relatively low tax rates such as these ones, the big advantage of an annual tax on wealth is that it would produce democratic transparency about wealth and we would know more about who owns what in South Africa and how this is changing over time. I think it is very important in a country to be able to look year after year at how the different social groups and the different wealth groups are doing; and how they are benefiting or not benefiting from growth and development. If we don’t have this kind of public information, then this is what gives a voice to very extreme statements from one way or another, from both sides, and it makes it very difficult to come to reasonable and peaceful solutions.  

I understand that many people in the business community might be against that, but then in the end, in the long run, I think it is in the interest of the business community to promote transparency about wealth. If you refuse transparency, it must be there is something to hide. That’s not good. In order to build trust in a country I think it’s very important to have that kind of transparency about income and wealth dynamics.

And finally, the last and fourth effective right which I would like to stress has to do with economic and political democracy. I think it’s important in South Africa, like in other countries in the world, to have new discussions about worker participation in companies and participatory governance. There are many countries in the world, including countries that are doing very well in terms of economic efficiency and exports and competitiveness, like Sweden and Germany, where workers have strong power in the board of companies. In Sweden, you have one-third of your seats in boards of companies that go to workers; in Germany it’s up to half, and apparently this does not prevent them from producing good products and exporting all over the world.

In my country, in France, for a long time, employers and business people were completely against it; well, they are still against it, but the difference is that two years ago there was a law that there was going to be one employee representative out of 12 board members; it varies – it’s much less in Sweden than in Germany but because everybody was telling employers in France: “Look, this is what they are doing in Germany and you know German firms are doing better than French firms, so why don’t you want workers on board?” In the end, maybe it’s a way to involve workers in the strategy of the company, so instead of just fighting you can have effective discussion about the strategy of the company, and sometimes this can also be a way to promote more long-run strategy than short-term maximisation of profits.

Now let me turn to the third, and final part of this lecture, which has to do with is the global response to inequality. I think South Africa can’t solve all inequality problems in the world alone and there are many issues which rich countries, particularly countries in the north, have a huge responsibility, particularly in order to promote global financial transparency and fight against tax havens. More generally, it’s clear that countries in the north have a huge historical responsibility for inequality in the world today and poverty in many southern countries. Europe has a direct responsibility for the existence of apartheid in the first place and, more generally, the apartheid system was a simply one extreme version of a form of a colonial inequality structure that you see in French colonies, in British colonies, all across colonial history.

The French Revolution was very strong in terms of abstract principles. Article 1 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789 was saying that all men should have equal rights, that social distinction should be based only on common utility. But, in practice, the French Republic went on to develop one of the worst colonial empires in history. The French revolutionaries said in 1792 that they wanted to abolish slavery, but then, the government of France under Napoleon reinstated slavery, which was finally and abolished finally in 1848.

And when Haiti took the French Revolution seriously and decided that they would be independent in 1804, not only was France very unhappy, but France said in the end, in 1825: “You’re going to be independent, but you’re going to pay a price for it and there is going to be a large compensation to the slave owners, to us, for you being free.” A very large public debt was imposed on Haiti and Haiti had to reimburse until the middle of the 20th century and all along the 19th century, Haiti is paying interest to France as compensation for the fact that the slave owners are not getting any income from their slaves.

There is so much historical amnesia. We forget about these things. When Haiti started to ask for compensation again a few years ago and in 2004, when they were commemorating their 200th anniversary, the French government said: “Okay, we won’t go to Haiti for the anniversary, because we don’t want to hear about this compensation.”

This is just an example to say that historical amnesia, and the responsibility of northern countries in today’s inequality situation in the world is enormous. If we look at the future, because, just talking about the past is not enough, although I think in this case there is still time for compensation and reimbursing that debt that was paid from Haiti to France. But if we look at the future, and from a more global perspective, I think it’s clear that Europe and North America have a strong responsibility if we want to encourage financial transparency in the world. I think Europe and North America should stop having a double language with Africa, which means on the one hand they always give lessons about governance and transparency etcetera and on the other hand, their own multinational companies and their own wealthy citizens are the very ones who are benefiting from financial opacity and they are doing nothing at all about it. So it’s really a double language, which I think is absolutely terrible.

What Africa needs is not foreign aid. Africa is not asking for help. What Africa needs is an international legal system that allows African countries to make multinational companies and wealthy citizens pay their fair tax. This is what Europe and North America should now offer. So I think there are at least two concrete proposals that northern countries should make, on which they should make substantial progress.

The first one is that there should be a lot more transparency about how much multinational companies from Europe and North America are paying in tax when they are doing business in Africa, and so the European Parliament sort of voted a tax about this two years ago but it is not sufficient information disclosure; and in addition the information is actually very difficult to access, so you know it’s a very strange system where the companies are supposed to disclose information but in the end it’s so well hidden in remote reports that are not accessible freely online that nobody can get the information. In any case, the requirements that were made, in terms of information disclosure, were completely insufficient to compute what we would like to compute in order to impose better behaviour in these companies.

Now the second proposal, which I think is even more important, is that Europe and North America should accept the creation of a world financial register on financial assets, which would be a central repository for financial assets so that we will know who owns what financial assets all across the world.

Some of you might react by saying, “Oh, but this is completely utopian, how could we do that?” Well, let me tell you that in fact we already have this kind central repository for assets, because it’s useful for private companies to know who owns them. You know, now you don’t have paper titles for a long time so it’s all electronic titles and you need someone to keep track of who owns what in the world, otherwise you could have different people who claim that they own the same company which would create a number of problems.

So you have some central repository that keeps this information, but these are private institutions, these are not public institutions. So they are called ClearStream or EuroStream in Europe, they are called National Depository Trust Corporation in the US. So these are private corporations who are offering these services to financial companies, so that they keep track of who owns them. But these private institutions do not collaborate with the public institution, in particular do not send their information to the tax administration. So I think it is time that governments in Europe and North America in particular, but all across the world, take control of these private repository institutions and create a public wealth registry of financial assets.

I think, first that would be useful also for financial regulation when we try to monitor world financial crises when nobody has any idea of who owns what in the world (you know this creates problems also just for macroeconomic policy and basic financial regulation), but most importantly this would be important for taxation policy because this is what would allow the different countries to better know who owns what in their own country and to impose a minimal taxation.

Now this is possible, in particular the European Union and the United States are about to negotiate a new transactive treaty to reduce tax on trade but the bottom line is that there is no tax on trade any more, so there is not much to do in this treaty and that will be a unique opportunity to tell the world, “Okay, now we’re going to be serious to fight tax havens.”

That will be very important for everybody in the world but particularly for Africa, because if we take the existing estimates of what fraction of the world financial assets are held in tax havens, the fraction is much bigger in African countries or for the Middle East than it is for Europe or France. The best estimates we have for Africa are between 30 and 50% of financial wealth is held offshore. So clearly this is in effect a way to take away from Africa some of the resources that are necessary for development.

So again, just to conclude, I don’t think what Africa needs is a new form of foreign aid which, in any case, let me remind you of this basic fact: all aid flows going to Africa are less than the official outgoing profit flows going out of Africa that are paid to owners, in particular in Europe and North America.

Now these are the official flows. So if we think of unofficial flows going to tax havens, again the estimates we have are at least of the same order of magnitude so the total would be vastly larger, at least twice as large as the aid flows. So, again, what we need really for the future is not so much to talk about aid, but simply to change the international legal system so that African governments can conduct a tax policy without being always threatened, sometimes by their own business community, to go away and not contribute to the common good.

I understand some people today are saying, “Okay, but we could just organise the system through voluntary donations and charitable giving,” and I understand that people who have a lot of money would like just to decide how much to contribute to such and such a project, but it’s very difficult to organise a society like this. It’s very difficult to organise a society where thousands of people just want to decide for themselves how much they want to contribute to the public good.

So we need a legal system, in particular an international legal system, that allows African countries to develop a fair tax system that’s asking as much from the people at the top, at least as much as the people in the middle and at the bottom, which is not the case as of today.

Let me now, as a general conclusion, try to be optimistic about the future. I said there are big challenges ahead but there are solutions and there are peaceful solutions to addressing inequality.

Let me be also optimistic about South Africa and Africa; I was making this comparison with the South African revolution and the French Revolution ... South Africa and France have a lot in common in a way. Today they are almost the same size: the population of France is 60-million, the population of South Africa is 55-million. So it’s almost the same size, but the big difference is that France has had a stagnant population for a very long time, so the population of France was already 40-million a century ago and 30-million at the time of the French Revolution.

So you know it’s almost the same country, almost the same families, whereas South Africa has gone through an enormous population growth and it’s a very young and dynamic and energetic country, and South Africa in 1910, at the time of the creation of the South African Union, had 6-million inhabitants, including 5-million black and coloured and 1-million white, and now we have gone from 10-[million] to 55-[million] with 5-[million] white and 50-[million] blacks and coloureds. So this is not the same country. When you multiply the size of a country by 10 and the population as of 1980 was around 30-million. So the country has gone from 30- to 55-[million].

Now these are enormous challenges. So when we talk about public infrastructure and public education, it’s difficult to keep up with this. It’s difficult, but in the long run I think that this is an asset. I’ve seen the youth of South Africa and the energy of the population of South Africa. It’s an asset. I think it’s better to have positive population growth, well maybe not enormous population growth but positive, rather than negative, population growth.

European countries who have negative population growth, I think, for the future, it is very frightening in terms of inequality and in terms of what these countries are going to become with the ageing, and some countries like France are having a few more children, and Germany is a bit more open to migrants recently, but then you have many countries in Eastern Europe, they don’t want children and they don’t want migrants either. So they are going to disappear …

South Africa and Africa are not going to disappear, and I think if these challenges that we have referred to today are addressed adequately, I think that Africa and South Africa are the future of the world and so, let me conclude this, and thanks a lot for your attention".