New York city mayor Zohran Mamdani is achieving what his opponents argued he could not. Among his achievements is universal childcare, affordable housing and improvements in public travel. In so doing, he has challenged not just his opponents, but an assertion by his African scholar father.
In his landmark 1996 work Citizen and Subject, Prof Mahmood Mamdani described how post-colonial states often failed to deliver full civic rights and state provisions to their populations.
The implicit promise of post-apartheid South Africa was that economic development would steadily expand the urban middle class, citizens with growing disposable incomes, social mobility and access to dependable public services.
Now, decades later, our recent analysis reveals that this promise has been a ruse for far too many South Africans. South Africa’s “middle class” has not gained the opportunity and gains of how we define and identify the middle class — expanding discretionary income.
Instead, they have been forced to buy back basic state functions out of their own pockets. Being middle class in South Africa today is not a marker of being on a sure trail to prosperity, but an exercise in extreme personal sacrifice.
For years, corporate strategists and policy commentators have held onto a comfortable narrative. As it goes, the theory is that as citizens cross a certain income threshold survival gives way to discretionary spending — fuelling sales of cars, better homes and retail expansion, and generally propping up economic growth.
It is a great theory, but quite detached from South Africa’s structural reality. Part of the problem lies in how we measure the middle class. According to official statistics, if you line up every earner in the country, the statistical median sits at roughly R5,400 a month — a figure barely above the national minimum wage and far closer to poverty than true consumer power.
To access what most people consider a modern middle-class lifestyle, an individual needs to earn roughly R25,000-R29,000 a month. However, earning R25,000 a month statistically places a worker in the top 10%-15% of all income earners nationwide, which for many means barely keeping your head above water. The fundamental mistake in analysing this group is assuming their choices reflect discretion. They reflect triage, to use a medical term.
In an ideal system, tax-paying citizens rely on a baseline social wage provided by the state — functioning public schools, reliable municipal services, dependable healthcare and safe and cost-effective public transport. But we know that in South Africa failing public infrastructure levies a punitive “private tax” on net earnings.
Before a middle-class earner can contemplate discretionary spending, their salary is systematically eroded. Medical aid premiums are a non-negotiable given that public healthcare is overwhelmed. Private security fees are mandatory because community safety cannot be guaranteed; private school fees are prioritised because public and supposedly free education is unreliable and “unfit-for-purpose”.
Before a middle-class earner can contemplate discretionary spending, their salary is systematically eroded.
Layer on top of this the socioeconomic reality of “black tax”, where professionals routinely absorb the basic living expenses of extended family members left behind by systemic structural unemployment, and any illusion of discretionary anything vanishes.
Data from the PayInc index confirms this reality: real, inflation-adjusted salaries have flatlined or declined over the past three years. Take-home pay isn’t growing but the cost of self-funding basic public goods is skyrocketing. Nowhere is this shift from discretion to sacrifice clearer than in private education.
For years, mid-tier private school networks such as Curro were celebrated as proof of a thriving, consumption-driven middle class. They demonstrated that families were eager to invest their discretionary income into their children’s futures.
However, from our analysis, corporate data tells a far more troubled story. School networks face rising student attrition — particularly in the preprimary and primary phases — alongside expanding debtor books as parents struggle to keep up with payments.
Parents aren’t opting into private education out of extra resources. They are cutting essential household costs to afford it. When financial strain becomes unbearable, families are forced to pull their children out of primary school to preserve enough capital for private high school tuition later on.
When a family has to ration which years of schooling they can afford, that is not consumer confidence but economic survival. And, more sadly, a desperate move to secure a better future against present needs.
If business leaders and policymakers continue to view this demographic through the lens of “discretionary spenders” they will keep misreading the South African economy. Retailers expecting sustained volume growth, banks relying on low-risk credit expansion, and government officials drafting tax policies targeting the top 15%, are banking on a fiction.
South Africa’s middle class is not an engine of excess spend, but a shock absorber. It absorbs the collapse of state services, the poverty of extended family networks and the unrelenting squeeze of stagflation.
Until structural reforms restore the public services middle-class taxes are supposed to cover, this group will not drive South Africa’s economic expansion — it will simply keep making sacrifices until there is nothing left to cut.
Mamdani Snr described our problem; Mamdani Jnr is engineering ways out of it. We too need to do something too, or the consequences will be dire.
• Payi is an economist and strategist with Inani Strategies.
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