I blame fake signer Thamsanqa Jantjie.
Thomas Piketty is puzzled. To a near-capacity crowd in Soweto, he confesses that South Africa presents him and his fellow economists with a conundrum.
A "conundrum" to some possibly. Ears that cannot hear, eyes that cannot see, sort of thing I reckon.
"Of course now we are 25 years after the fall of apartheid ... [but] inequality is not only still very high in South Africa, but has been rising and in some ways income inequality is even higher today than 20 years ago. This is something we want to better understand," he told the audience at the University of Johannesburg campus.
Piketty has made it his life's work to solve exactly these kinds of puzzles. His bestselling book, Capital in the 21st Century, addresses this problem on a global scale.
He argues that capitalism today is fundamentally flawed because wealth will always grow faster than economic output. In other words the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
This is the ideological foundation for the Occupy protests around, who say that the top 1% profit while 99% suffer, and it's this thesis has made Piketty a celebrity.
Delivering the prestigious annual Nelson Mandela lecture last weekend, Piketty outlined why he thinks South Africa is still so dramatically unequal -- and suggests a few things that can be done about it.
Skipping to the bottom line:
"We've got the framework in place but I think the problems are not in the economics; it's not even in the tax law. Our problems are in the leadership and how we convene society to understand that we're in this together," said Manuel.
Bold finding that. Very bold.
In Soweto, Piketty's ideas earned him two standing ovations. But will this be the extent of their impact on South Africa?
So Affirmative Action on steroids is failing? How could this possibly have happened ?