And yet, Mr Maponya is worried about South Africa - about the angry crowds of jobless youths, the failing schools, the culture of entitlement, the cronyism in government, the widening wealth gap, the lack of urgency in tackling entrenched unemployment, and the danger that populist demagogues offering easy answers and old cliches will bring things to boiling point.
Amid all the talk of addressing the wealth gap, the party's plenum reiterated a commitment to rapid growth by restating a goal of raising China's GDP to double its 2000 level by 2010.
The first episode of The Wealth Gap was broadcast on BBC World Service on Tuesday 17 January.
So as income inequality grew, the government propped up spending by promoting easy credit for less wealthy Americans, and much of the profit from that easy credit fed the wealth of the richest, widening the gap between rich and poor yet further.
This gap gets even wider when the household wealth of these children is considered.
According to the University, the total income of the top 20 percent of the rural households was 10.19 times higher than the bottom 20 percent and that the wealth gap in west China was bigger than in the east of the country.
If anything, the visible presence of such wealth points to a widening gap between those that have and the rest.
Even at that age I could sense the gap in wealth and living standards compared to the relative comfort of growing up in a single parent family in Croydon.
Until there is substantial redistribution of wealth from rich to poor school-districts, the gap will only grow wider.
That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between blacks and whites, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persist in so many of today's urban and rural communities.
It concerns the growing wealth gap there in Sweden, which I think some people believe is one of the motive forces behind the violence of the last week.
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