Johannesburg, though widely considered the richest city in Africa, does not seem to be as rich as it’s claimed to be. If you go downtown you will find it to be dusty and for how much people hype up Johannesburg as the richest city in Africa, on the borderline of depressing. The best way to describe it is if you’re expecting Gucci and end up with Target. So why do people still consider it as the richest city in Africa? Well, you have to consider a key fact about Johannesburg’s economy, it’s that Johannesburg has over 10 thousand millionaires, and 25 centi-millionaires, along with two billionaires. According to my calculations, the minimum that all of these people could be worth together is $24,025,000,000. Now just this 24 billion dollars could help shake the city’s GDP per capita, and it did. Johannesburg’s GDP per capita is around 12 thousand dollars per person. Now compare this to Cape Town’s 13 thousand dollars per person, now compare that two Cairo’s 4 thousand dollars per person. Now the last one may sound a little weird to put out there but its sheer numbers of people and importance to Egypt put it up there. The final verdict may be unclear but my take away from all this research is that what the richest city in Africa mostly depends on who you ask, and what data you chose to trust. For this post I chose to assume the most median number that was easy to work with. But think of it, this title could be more like ‘Johannesburg is NOT the richest city in Africa’, just by using different information. And so the answer to the question ‘why is Johannesburg considered the richest city in Africa’ is probably that people decided to trust the people who said it was rich.