The number of millionaires in Africa increased significantly last year – despite the corona pandemic. But inequality has also increased. Nowhere in the world is it bigger than in South Africa.
Agnes Avenue in Johannesburg: In no other country is wealth distributed as unequally as in South Africa.
It’s been a good year for Aliko Dangote. The Nigerian businessman’s fortune has increased by around 1.5 billion dollars in the past twelve months. With now 20.7 billion dollars, the 64-year-old, who is best known for his cement company, is loud Bloomberg the wealthiest African.
Dangote is no exception, the African super-rich are doing well. According to that Forbes Africa Magazine the wealth of Africa’s $18 billionaires has increased by 15 percent over the past year. It now totals $85 billion.
The number of African dollar millionaires is also loud a recent report of the consulting firm Henley & Partners increased significantly in 2021. It is therefore 136,000 today – an increase of 11,000 compared to the previous year.
At least the rich Africans seem to have survived the corona pandemic well. In 2020, the virus plunged the continent’s economy into recession for the first time in a quarter of a century. In many places, this partially reversed the progress made previously, for example in the fight against poverty; In addition, a debt crisis is looming in numerous countries.
40,000 millionaires in South Africa
According to the Henley & Partners report, the vast majority of Africa’s wealthy live in a few countries. Around a third of all dollar millionaires – almost 40,000 – live in South Africa alone. Egypt, Nigeria, Kenya and Morocco follow in further places. Accordingly, around half of all private wealth on the continent is found in these five countries – even though they only account for a third of Africa’s population.
This shows that Africa’s wealth is distributed extremely unequally. According to a study According to the NGO Oxfam in 2019, the cumulative wealth of the three richest Africans is equal to that of the poorest 50 percent of the total population. That’s around 650 million people.
In a global comparison, too, Africa performs poorly in terms of wealth equality: according to the most recent World Inequality Report, According to an annual report in which the Paris School of Economics collaborates, wealth is distributed more unequally only in Latin America than in Africa.
In figures this means that in Africa the wealth of the richest 10 percent of the population is 351 times greater than that of the poorest 50 percent. For comparison: In Europe, the corresponding value is 66.
The most unequal country in the world
The wealth differences within many African countries are also striking. Inequality is particularly pronounced in Nigeria and South Africa, the continent’s two largest economies. In both countries she has noisy a study at Credit Suisse has once again increased significantly since 2000.
In Nigeria, where Dangote is by no means the only super-rich, this development is particularly worrying because no other country in the world has more extremely poor people. According to recently published study According to the World Bank, around 87 million Nigerians have to get by on less than $1.90 a day. The study also comes to the conclusion that little progress has been made in fighting poverty since 2015.
Inequality is even more pronounced in South Africa. According to various rankings, the country occupies the last place worldwide in terms of the (unequal) distribution of income and the distribution of private wealth. It is worrying that inequality has increased from an already very high level since the end of apartheid in the mid-1990s.
What that means can be impressively expressed in figures: the richest 10 percent of the population in South Africa today unite according to the World Inequality Report around 86 percent of private assets. Meanwhile, the corresponding proportion of the poorest 50 percent of the population is even in the red, because debts exceed assets here. In other words, in the African country where most millionaires live, the bottom line for the poorer half of the population is that they own nothing.