Vilfredo Pareto observed years ago that 80% of income in his native Italy went to 20%of the population. The ratio may differ slightly, but it's a principle that seems to prevail in many countries and in circumstances that go beyond wealth distribution. As one management guru neatly put it: 20% of your activities will account for 80% of your results, 20% of your customers will account for 80% of your sales, 20% of your products or services will account for 80% of your profit, and so forth.
Or, put differently, of a list of 10 things to do, two may turn out to be more important or worth more than the other eight. A businessman worth his onions would therefore know where to spend his time and resources - for maximum benefit - and which to ignore or delegate to his minions.
The 80-20 rule or the law of the vital few has baffled policy makers, and has in a way been at the centre of economic debates that have raged down the ages. How do you get an equal share of the cake? Or how do you equally share the burden that produces the cake? Should everyone fend for himself, or am I still my brother's keeper? From this conundrum many an ideology has been spawned, and wars have been waged.
In politics it's often not what is said but who said it that's important. The vital few or the establishment gets its way. For the poor, it's not what they say, but their numbers that sometimes counts. Which is perhaps why those who feel ignored or neglected will prefer to march, flooding the streets in greater numbers, because that's the only way they think their voices can be heard.
It has often been difficult, for instance, to make head or tail of the noise around the ANC leadership tussle. How seriously should one take the cacophony behind Jacob Zuma? What is the authority or the weight of the voices of those calling for Zuma's anointment? Are they part of the vital few or the trivial many? Nobody knows for sure, but they sometimes appear as though they're a rabble looking for a cause.
Power and money go together. They find each other ultimately. Money buys influence, and power, well, it gets whatever it wants, including money. The phenomenon cuts across all political ideologies. In the Soviet Union, while the general populace made do with very little, the party apparatchiks would repair to their dachas on the Black Sea, which were often stocked with everything to make life comfortable. Equality of the human species is often a myth.
We're not going to be immune in the new SA to the 20% getting 80% of all the good things in life and making all the critical decisions affecting the rest of us. Previously, the vital 20% was an all-white club. Now it's a shade greyer, thanks obviously to political transformation, but vitally to black economic empowerment. A class rather than a race divide is emerging. No surprise, BEE's biggest beneficiaries are those with political connections. Kwame Nkrumah lived by the dictum: "Seek ye first the political kingdom, and all else will follow." It's working - for some.
So our vital few, the creme de la creme of our politics, the ANC NEC, are meeting as we speak to map out our destiny. By definition, the poor won't be represented among the assemblage at the top table. But there will be a lot of waffle about helping the poor.
Of the raft of policies on the table, none will do the trick. If you want to help the poor, let them speak themselves. And make sure their voice counts where it matters. In the halls of power. Change the electoral system.
But then that would defeat the whole purpose of the vital few, wouldn't it?
e-mail: fmeditor@fm.co.za
