Deputy president Cyril Ramphosa says the wealth of the country needed to be shared and the poor have to enjoy the fruits of the vast mineral resources.
"There is an urgent need if we are to be a united nation to redistribute the wealth of our country," Ramaphosa said.
Ramaphosa was speaking at the 3rd anniversary memorial of the late president Nelson Mandela in Johannesburg on Monday night. He said while South Africa was regarded as a middle-class income country, in reality, it should not be the case as many of the people find themselves below the middle-income gap.
"A united South Africa require the restorations of the land for those who work it. It requires a meaningful transfer of ownership and control of our country's natural resources over the means of production to the people as a whole. Reconciliation resides in not so much in forgiving the wrongs but in righting the wrongs of the past," he said.
Ramaphosa added that the wrongs of the past must be corrected as that was what Madiba would have wished for, something he dedicated his life to achieving. According to Ramaphosa, in order to attain that, South Africans need to be united around a shared vision, a shared future of a better society.
He admitted that the recently agreed national wage was not adequate to ensure the poor can be able to live a comfortable life.
"We should be worried as I was when the advisory panel that we appointed to look at the issue of the national minimum wage came back with a report that said 50% of South Africans live below the minimum living level. Meaning that 50% of working South Africans earn below R4,500 a month. When we announced the minimum wage someone said we would like to see whether Cyril Ramaphosa can live on R3,500. They are right, I cannot because what the panel came up with is not a living wage, we are still far from the living wage," he said.
He said the working poor earn far less than R3,500. As the country ponders and deals with the matter, a delicate balance has to be found.
"If we raise the minimum wage to a higher level, we wipe out a lot of jobs. Should there be a balance that we strike? What is clear with this effort is that we need to lift more than 7 million South Africans out of wage inequality. Make sure they earn a wage that is above a much lower level and the minimum wage being proposed will be the floor which no South African should ever earn a salary. It will give us a springboard which we will then begin to continue with the campaign to make sure that South Africans have a decent life," he said.
Ramaphosa conceded that the inequalities between the salaries of whites and blacks in the country would continue to hamper the attempts to build a non-racial country.
"For as long as the natural state of black South Africans is poor and the natural state of a white South African is privileged, we will never succeed in building a non-racial society," he said.
Ramaphosa called on South Africans to be committed to a common programme to achieve Mandela's vision. He said the achievement of a united South Africa demanded that people start listening to one another and fully grasp where the other side of society comes from.
"At the root of the many challenges in the political and social arena is that people are not listening to each other. From the benches of Parliament to the highest structures of our movement, from our radio stations to our twitter feeds, everyone is talking. We are talking continuously. In Parliament, you just need to open the channel and everybody is talking but the key question is whether we are listening to one another. Very few of us are listening to what the others are saying. We need to be engaged in a national dialogue in which each of us is prepared to give honest consideration to the views of others. It is only by doing this that we can hope to build national consensus," he said.
Ramaphosa maintained that on the issue of the national minimum wage, they had to listen to those who said if the minimum wage was set too high, there would be job losses while also having to listen to those who said what they earned was not sufficient.