Africa (southern), must boot up.

 It is generally accepted that the cradle of humanity (Homo sapiens) is here in southern Africa. It is also established that the World’s most unequal societies are in countries that are here in southern Africa. I wonder if there is any correlation between those two situations.

What I do not wonder about, but am quite convinced about, is that massive inequality in the standard of living of a country’s inhabitants leads directly to social instability and conflict. People at the bottom of the social ladder simply never accept that they work less hard than those at the top. That is one reason why the former resort to taking drugs to “ease the pain”; digging up their own infrastructural copper cables to go sell and support their drug consuming habits; picking up arms to engage in cash in transit heists etc. 

Southern Africa must remove this stigma of “most unequal” societies. I don’t believe that the road to a just and equitable society lies in “confiscating land” with or without compensation, because once confiscated, the land belongs to society anyway, just as it did before purchase/confiscation. What’s more, the act of confiscation scares away investors – both foreign and domestic. Rather than confiscate the land, governments should simply tax it. Taxing the land will not only bring in revenue into the national purse, but will act as an incentive for the owners of the land to make it productive so that it pays for its “upkeep”.  Those land owners who cannot, or will not make their land productive will eventually lose their right of ownership. Foreign and/or domestic investors can then come in and invest UNDER THE SAME REGIME OF PAYING TAXES FOR THE LAND.

A highly unequal society gets inundated with drugs, partly because the drug lords see a path towards easy riches that way. It may seem insensitive of me given a fellow citizen facing the death penalty somewhere for being a drug mule, to state my firm belief that the only way to rid a country of drugs is to go after the drug lords and kill them. Killing the mules will not arrest the problem quickly enough, though in the very long term it may have a positive effect. As for consumers, those are patients. Taking away the supply gives them their humanity back.