Choose solidarity, or implosion

No one could reasonably argue that the challenge of youth unemployment and poverty is not on the South African agenda: it gets a mention in almost every cabinet-level speech and most of the policy documents that flow from our bloated executive.

Where it is less present is on the credit side of the balance sheets that weigh rhetoric against delivery, intention against outcome and policy against product.

This week's riots across Britain underline the reality that the growing divide between rich and poor is not unique to South Africa, Africa or even the developing world. It exists wherever people who have nothing gather outside the walls erected by those who have everything - and plan to keep it.

Just as South Africa does not have the money to make the problems of the poor go away, so too the mature economies of the so-called West are straining under the burden of debts accumulated to feed the appetites of their elites. Neither has the cash to conjure up jobs, income or even hope for the young.

I spend enough time in townships to know what poverty looks like and how it smells, but I got closer to understanding what the other side of the wealth divide might feel like in the benign streets of Rosebank, while walking between The Times head office and the B&B I use when I am there.

For a few minutes on such a walk, one can sense the alienation that must be felt all the time by the security guards in their wooden cabins, the women taking their lunch breaks on the manicured grass sidewalks and the children that both sometimes have with them. The streets are shady corridors between walls that seem to get higher every year and gates so solid one cannot even peep through a crack.

Electric fences are the exclamation marks on the message that what is within those walls is not for those outside to see, touch or have.

That sense must be multiplied almost infinitely in other places where the hopelessly poor brush up against the world of comfort and plenty, such as the shopping malls where they might be tolerated peering through windows, but never across the threshold, and on the television shows that reflect the lives they would love to live.

Technology and fashion probably symbolise that wished-for life, which is why youngsters who turned to burning and looting in London went for shops selling computers, flat-screen TV sets and hip clothes rather than food, disposable nappies or cooking utensils.

Youngsters across the Arab world, in Europe a few years ago and now in Britain, are losing patience with the wait to get what they see all around them. The changing structure of our societies is dismantling the constraints that once limited their behaviour.

There are words of solidarity from the masters of this economic universe, but they are negated by the lack of concrete action to share the wealth piling up in the hands of the few.

The cellphones these young people have, though not as fine as the ones they may wish to have, are enough to establish a network between them to share frustration or to bring them out on the streets.

We have seen some of that anger in South Africa already, though focused more on the essentials of life than on the spoils of wealth. The pressure to get a share of those spoils has so far been contained by ramping up the rhetoric and adding new promises to promises already broken. But we have little to show to these young men and women that will convince them that there are better days ahead.

Ebrahim Patel, the minister of economic development, tried last year to open a debate about moderation at the top of the economic ladder with his suggestion of a temporary cap on executive earnings. Our culture of unrestrained accumulation strangled his initiative and everyone quickly defaulted to prior positions in the race to acquire by every available means.

While the richest 10th of South Africa's population divide half the national income among themselves and scramble for more, the poorest 10% share just 1% of it. Surely, as we watch the known world melt around us, even just the instinct to survive should be telling us the old order is not sustainable.

A new world order is on the horizon. We can help design it, or we can continue to patch and glue the old one until it implodes or explodes.

It will be too late then for those trying to protect what they had to discover the virtues of solidarity.