ANDILE KHUMALO: Slashing inequality serves business
Prioritising poor in capitalism's best interest
So the theme of inclusive growth was discussed at length by everybody at this year's World Economic Forum on Africa in Durban, yet the pink elephant in the room remains untouched: how do you get business to buy into the concept of inclusivity? I have yet to meet a CEO who wakes up every morning thinking about how he is going to make the world a better and less unequal place. Business is primarily accountable to capital, whether it be shareholders or debt holders. Their bosses are clear about why they allocate the billions of debt and equity to them - to generate returns. How, then, do we get business to appreciate that an increasingly unequal society is against its commercial interest and that of its masters? In the African economic outlook session, Germany's finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, observed that most of the recent sociopolitical instability we are experiencing points to societies that have features of actual or perceived inequality, and that business ought to be very i...
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