SIKONATHI MANTSHANTSHA: Why you should be shocked by the hard facts of poverty
It is the choices we have made as a people that have landed us in this state of affairs. Not so long ago we seemed to be on the right track to eradicating poverty
Statistics SA rudely reminded us this week how much poorer we’re getting in SA. The agency says 55.5% of South Africans — 30.4m people — were living in poverty in 2015, more than in 2011, when 53.2% of our compatriots lived below the "upper-bound poverty line" (UBPL) of R992/person per month. Pitiful as this amount is, these are among the luckier, less-poverty-stricken ones among us. The agency tells us 21.9m people were living in what Stats SA calls the "lower-bound poverty line" (LBPL) where they had to make do with R647/person a month. Then there were the 13.8m living in extreme poverty, the "food poverty line" (FPL) of R441/month. These are all April 2015 figures, and are adjusted to account for inflation. Stats SA divided the poverty levels into three categories, and these make for grim reading. "These lines capture different degrees of poverty and allow SA to measure and monitor poverty at different levels."
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