The state of South Africa, 28ish years post-apartheid
awanderingmind.blog
awanderingmind.blog
I also found this funny:
The SA government became involved to avoid having a hostile Soviet-aligned country on their doorstep facilitating an armed resistance against their rule (at least that’s what they claimed, and there are reasons to believe them) - the ANC was involved, because, well, they saw themselves (and many members still do, as I pointed out above) as a revolutionary member of a community of anti-imperialist forces aimed at the emancipation of the African proletariat.
I read over and over about strategists in all governments playing their chess pieces to avoid domination by other world powers. There is no laughable irony in what happened in Afghanistan when you read back about the soviet and US involvement and the revolving door of friendships that turned into enemies, and then back.
It seems crazy that we have a bonafide war in Ukraine right now, and so many world powers are avoiding getting involved directly, but are constantly involved indirectly and surreptitiously over and over to great detriment.
I wonder how the people in power form their opinions about what actions are necessary, and how the people making these decisions climb higher and higher into positions of power and decision making when the results all seem so awful. I suppose I'm only hearing about the bad outcomes, not the successes.
Does anyone have examples of a world power funding a revolutionary force and it ending in peace and prosperity?
I also enjoyed My Traitor's Heart"
The French helped out the American revolution and the two haven’t had a major military conflict. Although it did end up bankrupting the French monarchy and causing the Revolution.
While military deaths are invariably put at between 2.5 million and 3.5 million, civilian death tolls vary from 750,000 to 3 million. Thus estimates of total dead, both military and civilian, range from 3,250,000 to 6,500,000.
That is of course very selective; I have no read Pinker's book, but I don't think he argues that horrible wars never occurred, just less so.
It's important to keep in mind that the population has also grown in the intervening period. For example, Caesar's conquest of Gaul cost the lives of about a million Celts, with a further million enslaved (estimates). While "1 million" and even "2 million" seems low compared to, say, the second world war, it was a huge percentage of the population, up to as much as ~25%.
There are many such truly staggering figures if you look at history. No one really remembers it in the same way as we do more modern atrocities, which is why we can have fun Asterix & Obelix cartoons about it, but the numbers of historical battles are often truly staggering.
I don't know if Pinker was right or wrong, but I do think you really need to actually look at the numbers to get a good overview throughout the centuries and you can't just rely on "armchair analysis" for this sort of thing, as there will be a strong bias towards more recent events.
I think the genocides of the XX century completely negate Pinker's entire thesis. I am not saying there were no genocide before, but I do not see a downward trend, and some of the largest contributors to these genocides are some ideologues that are the children of the enlightenments.
I think it only stopped because of 1) technological advancements, nukes in particular, that made a war between large powers unthinkable (if you look back at the XIX/XX century, every large war was an order of magnitude more destructive than the previous one because of technology), and 2) capitalism which created a large middle class (the XX century term for what would have been called bourgeoisie in the XIX century) who aspire to live peacefully and have the resources to ensure it happens.
Sure, but I think you need to do a more detailed analysis that goes beyond "look at these horrible things that happened in the last 100 (or 400) years!" On the face of it Pinker's claim indeed seems very counter-intuitive, but sometimes counter-intuitive things are true. Pinker may very well be wrong, but I wouldn't dismiss his argument quite so quickly from my armchair.
People tend to hand wave away the massive cost in human lives it's historically taken to replace a regime with a more "enlightened" one.
The decades following the overthrow of Charles I of England, Louis XVI of France, Nicholas II of Russia, or Wilhelm II of Germany were not good ones.
This point requires justification. There’s no evidence that democracy would have arrived in France without revolution.
Or even, with American president trying to extort Ukrainian president to persecute familly of his political opponents so that he can cheat elections in USA ...
It is "revolution" when it ends in positive (for the west) outcomes
It is "terrorism" when it does not
The simple answer is that the US military industrial complex dominates our foreign policy decisions. "Success" is measured in how much money was given to boeing and how much boeing agrees to give back through political donations and "speaking fees" after the politicians are out of office.
Western Europe in and post WWII would seem to apply.
Israel is pretty prosperous if you're Israeli.
The problem is that basically wherever you go in the world, you can find lack of peace and prosperity, and you can usually find some reason or another to attribute some blame to one power or another involved in the last major change. Any location you name will welcome a "what about X!?"
The whole world though, the whole of human civilization is now and has been for a long time on a significant upward trend in peace and prosperity. If you smooth out the bumps there is a very significant increase in every metric you could think was positive. Consistently. For centuries. Is that a result of world power using force? Probably to a significant extent.
The problem here is solid data, but I believe we are at an all time high with the need and use of antidepressants and co.
"has been for a long time on a significant upward trend in peace and prosperity"
Prosperity paid for with a coming climate collaps and deforestation and constant fear of nuclear holocaust.
I am really not an back-to-the-trees kind of guy, but knowing rough and wild nature life and knowing and seeing the systematic suffering in our modern meatfactories (whether for humans or pigs) I remain very sceptical that everything is so much better now, than how it used to be.
And I am glad people are getting help they need. I wish more were.
Yes, unequivocally, and by every real measure life is better now than it has ever been for more people than ever before. You claim to "know rough and wild nature life" but how do you propose forcing it upon 8 billion human beings with your self indulgent logic? Nothing stops you from living this supposed rough life consistently, yet here you are regularly commenting on HN, participating in tech industries and contributing to the use of a wast, worldwide high technology infrastructure that extracts resources from the Earth to sustain itself. It's not just meat farms that contribute to massive natural resource use.
The aside about antidepressant use as an argument against the previous claim about improved living standards is just bizarre, because for one thing it does the opposite of negate a claim of improved conditions for people and secondly, it's such a minor thing relative to billions of people living longer, better, more calorically and medically stable lives than has ever been the case in any previous century.
No doubt the number of humans is at an all time high, but whether the amount of happiness on this planet is at an all time high, is quite dubious. Or is "happiness" not a real meassure?
"it's such a minor thing relative to billions of people living longer, better, more calorically and medically stable lives than has ever been the case in any previous century"
Modern people might be well fed, but overall they live a stressful, anxious and lonely life. They might still be better off, than a medival starving and exploited peasant, but human history is more diverse than that.
My main point was btw. that we have no real data, of how happy the average human was 10000 years ago, 1000 years ago, .. till now. Since we do not have that data, all the nice self reasuring meassurements are mainly a placebo.
What world powers funded revolutionary forces in Western Europe in and post WWII?
By winning the popular vote in an election. No revolution at all.
> The point applies at least there.
Even leaving aside the above, the point would only apply if you are claiming that Nazi Germany promoted "peace and prosperity" in Western Europe.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/hitler-was-not-voted... is a good example of the reasoning.
I did a bit of digging on Wikipedia. And based on the description in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1933_German_federal_el... I think the claim that the ‘33 election wasn’t a free election isn’t baseless.
Having your fascist enforcers “monitor” the election, helping elderly people to the voting booths and “helping” them to vote correctly all seem to be indicators that the election is fishy.
And even then, the fascist party didn’t even get a majority…
What is called in Israel the War of Independence and outside the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, wasn't a revolution. The Jews in Palestine had their own territory and governance distinct from the Arabs for decades. So I think it was more a case of expanding and consolidating what they already had.
Perhaps it’s because 1) what ideologies are widespread in a society is the key factor in determining that society’s prosperity and 2) historically (and to a large extent now) the only way to change ideologies on a large scale in a relatively short time span is refine change (and the often accompanying death, subjugation, and/or displacement of large populations).
There are, of course, many ideas of ways to organize a society such that new ideologies can be proposed, criticized, and implemented (and old ideologies disposed of) without such regime change. Some have even been implemented and are believed by many to be very promising.
Solidarity in Poland, supported with plausible deniability at arms length by the CIA.
Solidarity was a Polish labour union that grew massively in size from its foundation in 1980 to evolve into a civil resistance social movement using non-violent means to achieve change.
In 9 years Solidarity went from inception to leading Poland’s post-totalitarian communist pivot towards democracy.
In a program called QRHELPFUL, CIA provided cash as well as communicatio/distribution equipment via 3rd party cutouts to prevent the Soviet KGB and Polish UB/SB from portraying Solidarity as a western puppet.
It was incredibly successful, but it would best be described as providing a bit of tailwind to existing organic momentum.
CIA didn’t create Solidarity, they simply backed the right player in a non-kinetic way that has had lasting impact.
Poland’s post-communism pivot initially led by a Solidarity coalition government would be considered a considerable success for the people of Poland in terms of economic value creation and political freedom.
Israel is pretty prosperous if you're Israeli.
Northern Ireland, although the US funding was always indirect/deniable.
The people are certainly better off financially, thanks largely to the creativity and drive of entrepreneurs and workers. But go down to the public square and challenge the powers that be verbally. See how that ends for you.
Hint: they still send a bill for the bullets to the family.
Of the internal kind, there's Augusto Pinochet -- Chile is still the 2nd wealthiest country in Latin America in terms of per capita GDP (Uruguay being 1st)
Do what now? From what I have read it seems like Panama, Chile, and several Caribbean island nations all have higher per-capita GDP than Uruguay.
Greece? Post-WW2, the US-aligned powers funded a anti-communist drive in Greece, which successfully kept Greece on this side of the Iron Curtain.
Maybe paying more attention to geopolitics would yield this answer to you. The base of most conflicts is usually a resource war or outright coups to enable imperialism.
With your example of Ukraine, the finding of large oil and gas fields under the east, west and Crimean regions in 2012 sealed it's fate. The Maidan revolution 2 years later was nothing more than a coup setup by Jonn McCain and Lindsey Graham. Then Shell moved in to look at how to extract said resources.
Then it would have been likely Ukraine would be used as a base to cut off Russia's access to the middle east through the Volgograd Gap in order to more easily topple Assad, allowing the Qatar-Turkey pipeline to complete it's route through Syria, thus giving Europe an out from the Russian gas monopoly.
Of course the Russians couldn't stand for any of that, so they formed their own opinions about what actions were necessary. The action they chose ended up hurting them with Germany being forced into, (not even forming their own opinions), the necessary actions of dropping the Nord Stream pipelines, adding $100bn to their military budget and signing a deal with Qatari's for access to the yet to be completed Qatar-Turkey pipeline.
Of course all of this benefits the respective populations and corporations allowing them to climb into higher positions of power.
We like to think that politicians don't think further than the next election cycle and it's mostly true. But the deeper structures in the respective state, the states needs, and corporate profit ARE in fact playing the long game, causing the politicians to almost stumble upwards in some twisted version of natural selection.
When you take into account that US war corps get to test new weapons systems against a near peer adversary without having to sacrifice US lives, it's a perfect storm.
Like that old Bill Hicks bit... "Bring up G12 Tommy; says here it destroys everything but the fillings in their teeth!"
China.
This is the greatest example of all. Search for "Soviet support for Mao"
I've been reading about the failings and corruption of the ANC for years now. How do they manage to stay in power regardless? Are the other parties even worse? Bias in the political system? Many people genuinely believe in the ANC? Something else?
It's not really addressed in the article, but the root problem seems to be the lack of a functioning democracy where those in power are held accountable at least to some degree.
Politics tends to be complex, and while I know next to nothing about South-African politics I have no reason to believe it's any different there. You can't just apply Occam's razor to the first simple explanation that springs to mind.
Can happen earlier, I just hope when it happens it goes smoothly
The bit about the current government blames everything on Apartheid, but it only lasted 50 years ... before that it was centuries of colonial rule that put the basics laws of Apartheid in place feels almost like satire.
For how long can you blame the czars when they're no longer in power? And who does it serve?
It seems to me blaming the long gone czars mostly serves as a distraction from corruption in the successor government.
Going from no voting to every adult can vote is probably too much. Having elites create a parliament and make the foundation before full voting is how basically every well functioning modern democracy was formed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_Constitution
> The Lower House, or House of Representatives was directly elected by all males who paid at least 15 yen in property taxes, effectively limiting the suffrage to 1.1 percent of the population.
That 1.1 percent was expanded over the years. Then after WW2 USA just needed to finalize the expansion and you got a well functioning modern democracy.
By the time Japan became a democracy, the people were already accustomed to functional and orderly governance.
Afterwards it became a one-party democracy to an unusual extent. I am not sure what could or should be made of that, other than perhaps that one should be wary of general theories of political development.
IE, it didn't go from "no voting" to "every adult can vote". Millions of people voted in every single election from '48 onward.
There was a massive jump in voters in the first multiracial election of '94 (10+ million). But that's not the same as going from zero to full franchise.
Not sure how it should have been done, the old rulers were associated with apartheid so of course the population would want to replace them, but totally replacing a government in a single election and starting over from basically scratch doesn't seem to lead to good outcomes.
The years 1990-1994 could even be regarded as some type of unofficial transitionary government though.
To the credit of the '94 administration they did extend an olive branch to those existing pre-94 staff to remain/join their government. In fact FW De Clerk (president before Mandela) was Mandela's Vice President.
As a South African those early years of the ANC government still have a rosy tint as I still genuinely believe the ANC of that era (Mandela, maybe Mbeki to some degree) did try their best to move the country forward. The later Mbeki years and obviously JZ years are were things went backwards a few decades.
I'll argue that Mandela and Mbeki gathered up all that goodwill and did exactly nothing with it. Zuma was more publicly corrupt, but policy-wise, I don't think there was any daylight between him and his predecessors.
I suppose the gold standard for smooth regime change in Southern Africa would have to be Botswana. Don't know enough about their history to understand how they got it right when it was so bloody for all their neighbours.
[Recent history of Zimbabwe](http://imgur.com/a/VdQdD)
If a zinger or meme effectively and accurately communicates the message, why not?
>Like what is your point here?
This is your way of avoiding actually addressing what the "zinger or meme" in this case communicates, which is that life in Zimbabwe is immeasurably worse across the board since Mugabe took power.
Could you expand on this a bit? Why?
Fareed Zakaria is a proponent of this theory from the left: https://www.amazon.com/Future-Freedom-Illiberal-Democracy-Re...
Jonah Goldberg is a proponent of this theory from the right: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/04/off-the-shelf-suicide...
Incompetence and corruption are likely the enemies of such progress that are incredibly hard to root out. A lack of competition in politics is also a problem. Sure, the current mega party sucks, but who's going to do better?
"Putin is trying to be a czar, this is bad and Putin is bad"
Vs
"Putin is good, everything wrong with Russia is the fault of those perfidious czars! Citizens are reminded that any criticism of Putin is illegal czarist sentiment, and to report all czarist sentiment to Putin's secret police. They know where to find you."
When South Africans realized their public funds were being looted by the Gupta family, and the latter paid PR firm Bell Pottinger to come up with a campaign to blame everything on white people ... that starts looking a little more like the latter situation.
As long as their power structures still remain you can continue to blame them. However in the case of Russia, the Soviet Union pretty much hit the reset button on power and the elites of the Russia were thrown out.
AFAICT (I'm not very well versed in South African history), the elites of SA are the same and are largely inheritors of the pre-apartheid power structures. To me, any "solution" would have to address the deficiencies of the power structures that were setup 70-80 years ago.
This is the cognitive problem in a nutshell. If the power structures of the current government are the same as the old government, the problem lies with the current government.
If the new government does the exact same thing as the old government, the fact that the old government did it is not a defense
Why? Because the current government didn't hit a Soviet-style reset button?
If the current president is taking bribes, They are at fault. The fact that the last government was also corrupt is not an excuse.
Ironic that Mandela was so loved because he chose not hit the Soviet-style button. IMO he should have used all the political capital he had gathered to make some difficult decisions (not a reset, but major changes). Unfortunately for South Africa, he (and every subsequent ANC leader) just coasted, and here we are.
>Russia was ruled by tyrannical czars for centuries before Communism - does that mean the actions of Communist leaders like Stalin were really the czars' fault?
Absolutely yes, a thousand times. Maybe Nicky wasn't responsible for the colors Stalin picked for his office walls, but most of the important, nation-wide decisions were obviously affected by how (dismally) Nicky ran things.
>For how long can you blame the czars when they're no longer in power?
I'd say a very long time, probably centuries. I'm sure there's a PhD thesis or other publication somewhere estimating how long each economic/social policy impacted the country. Note that this isn't the same as saying "meh, we found it like this, let's not do anything".
>And who does it serve?
Anyone who's interested in learning from history and not repeating mistakes from the past?
>It seems to me blaming the long gone czars mostly serves as a distraction from corruption in the successor government.
It seems to me blaming the successor government mostly serves as a distraction from the very real, very recent despotism and absolutism of semi-medieval tsardom.
You can't.
>but most of the important, nation-wide decisions were obviously affected by how (dismally) Nicky ran things.
Observe the word most. Just as I was saying the tsars definitively were responsible for most (note the word carefully again) of the momentous decisions later, it should be painfully obvious that they weren't responsible for 100% of all actions forever after. This is ridiculously obvious in any non-insanely polarized debate, which unfortunately isn't always the case of HN.
> Note that this isn't the same as saying "meh, we found it like this, let's not do anything".
But isn't that how it's often deployed? "Don't look at me, blame the previous boss!" is an age old diversion strategy.
>But isn't that how it's often deployed? "Don't look at me, blame the previous boss!" is an age old diversion strategy.
It sure is, which is why I made that remark. My point is this kind of misuse doesn't automatically make the original claim false.
Also, the mirror-image claim is just as frequently deployed: don't look too closely at the skeletons in the closet; we now have a magical clean slate.
The arrogance.
There is a tendency for the ruling party to maximise the damage caused by Apartheid - there is also a corresponding impulse to minimise it by those who benefited from it (I'm including author here) who claim that it was brief (2 generations!), or a long time ago (1 generation!). To that, I present my own life story - I was born, and started my education during apartheid, which for people like me, meant going to poorer schools and having a limited curriculum suited to the modest career decided for me by the government based on the colour of my skin - such as in a mine or on the factory floor. I am in my mid-30s.
One of apartheid's most awful and lingering consequences is spatial apartheid, the creation of isolated racially-segregated communities far outside city centres, poorly-served by transport options, in areas marginal for local business and industry.
The ANC owns its fair share of blame for our present state, particular during the Zuma administration. The electricity crisis, worsening of police ineffectiveness and corruption, and collapse of local services are all failings of the ANC first and foremost.
But what's most important to understand is that fixing South Africa after 1994 was always going to be hard because of the huge amount of damage performed by apartheid. We were all far too sanguine about how easy it would be to move ahead, and coasted on a few years of goodwill and optimism without addressing the deep structural issues that caused social ruptures later on.
One of the challenges in writing is realising that no matter how hard you try, you will not be able to please every one. I spent a lot of time on this post, and it went through several revisions. In some versions I was harsher on the ruling party; in others I went into more detail about the brutality of colonialism and apartheid.
As I acknowledged in the post, I have my own biases, and therefore encourage people to do their own research. I also provided a very short list of some of the terrible things associated with, or directly caused, by apartheid. I could certainly have expanded upon that, but then the post would have been about apartheid, and not the current state of the country. I could also have expressed more empathy for the suffering of the millions of people in the country who lack access to basic services, decent jobs, access to educational opportunities, etc. I have however become increasingly disillusioned by that type of writing, as it does not seem to have helped improve the situation. It is rather a style that I think helps to salve the conscience, at the expense of avoiding true self-reflection.
A child comment to this points out that spatial apartheid is still very much a thing; I agree completely. I could have written about that; but that is not what I wanted to write about. I am more concerned by the fact that spatial apartheid still exists, and that little to no progress has been made in addressing it, than in the fact that a certain group of terrible people situated at a specific point in history were responsible for it.
An unfortunate situation has arisen where any criticism of the current situation in the country is construed as 'minimising the damage of apartheid' or something similar, with the subtext that the critic is probably racist in some way (or just too privileged to understand). South Africans need to wake up to this - it is one of the primary ways that the ruling party has entrenched itself, and shuts down any criticism of itself.
I would suggest you meditate on an alternative reality where all the people who make the criticisms are in actual fact both racist and privileged.
What would that look like? How could you tell? What if in other parallel worlds 25%, 50%, 75% of the people, or the things they say could be categorised as racist and/or privileged?
In which of these worlds would complaining about how everyone complains about racism and privilege be a good look and a constructive contribution? In which of these worlds would the person saying it actually be saying something privileged and racist?
I don't think 100% of white south Africans are privileged and racist 100% of the time when they have opinions on the running of their country, but 0% isn't my estimate either. I can see a range of answers that individuals have to that question being reasonable given their different life experiences.
It felt like you were falling into the common trap of seeming angrier about "people complaining about X" than "X" even as you mentioned that X was bad.
The mentions of great crimes all seemed a bit remote and dry, whereas the accusations of people being overdefensive and deflecting using it as an excuse seemed a bit more heartfelt.
I think from the inside it can be hard to judge that balance and put yourself in the position of someone who might weight things differently. A problem of "privilege" which you bring up, but don't seem to be swayed by, though I've never met anyone who thinks it doesn't apply to other people.
Yours was one of the better takes, and I mostly agree with what you have to say - I especially appreciate your self-awareness around biases (I have my own). I should clarify that didn't take issue with the entire article, I was mostly reacting to the sentences that implied, as I read it, that the period of formal Apartheid was brief, and an improvement over the previous colonial period (as quoted by gp) - those ideas sound absolutely tone deaf to me.
edit:
> An unfortunate situation has arisen where any criticism of the current situation in the country is construed as 'minimising the damage of apartheid' or something similar
You misunderstand me, I think, and possibly doing a great disservice to your article and the discussion it spawned if you're reducing my criticism to just that. I tried to clearly state why I thought you minimized specific aspects; and it's not because I wanted you to adopt a tone of atonement, or for something I wished you had written. I took issue with 2 specific ideas, which in all suggest that Apartheid wasn't a big deal. Perhaps we should discuss the specific criticism rather than be pulled into a generic race-relations meta-discussion?
What I disagreed with, in point form:
1) The idea that Apartheid was brief. 50 years is a long time in politics; Apartheid spanned >90% of both my granddads' productive years, 100% of my dad's education (including college) as well as his early and mid-career, and a small part of my early education. I count 3 generations directly impacted.
2) The idea that Apartheid was a long time ago. As you can imagine based off what I said in (1), the effects are still very present to me, and I'd like to think I'm not that old. This doesn't absolve the government, but it is true nonetheless.
Politicians deflect blame everywhere, but just because politicians like to ham-up Apartheid's effect doesn't mean we cannot have a nuanced, honest take.
That said, South Africa was built on the foundation extractive industries and cheap labor. The end of Apartheid did not change that; the only thing that changed was the introduction of the black ruling elite, and a modest increase in the size of the non-white middle class. The levels of inequality are dangerously high, and people seem concerned about it, until you ask them how much they pay the help (this goes across all races, BTW). The TRC was fine and all, equal attention should have been given to national cohesion, people are unwilling to look out for each other, even for their own sake, in the long term.
The author notes that it's "obviously bad" that inequality is so high in South Africa.
I may be inadvertently challenging some orthodoxy here but why is that?
The author also notes that around 1/4 of working age people contribute tax revenue. Would the rest really be better off without the top X% of taxpayers, other things being equal?
I think implicit in this critique is that the reader should think anything less than maintaining a western European standard of living is a failure on the government's part.
But South Africa's GDP PPP per capita is around that of Mongolia or Egypt, while one might think from reading this article that South Africa is a "temporary embarrassed" western European country.
The country has a lot of problems, but if you frame it like that one could view the status quo as a resounding success. While traveling there I ran into a lot of immigrants from countries to the north that migrated there for a better life.
I've read a few articles about South Africa with a similar tone, but they never really seem to get to the point.
Yes the ANC is corrupt, but even if you suppose the country were run with Swiss efficacy you're begging the question about what a $15,000 GDP PPP per capita version of Switzerland would look like.
The answer is likely to me much closer to Mongolia than Switzerland in terms of basic services, infrastructure etc
According to worldbank data the murder rate in SA is around 10 times higher than in Egypt, and around 5 times as high as in Mongolia.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?location... https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?location... https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?location...
If you like the correct framing is 'extreme suffering due to poverty', not 'high inequality'. The inequality is galling because there is a small percentage of people (myself included) who enjoy a good quality of life while millions of people live in poverty.
Purely in terms of 'inequality being bad', there are good reasons to believe that it undermines democracy (citation required I suppose).
Framing the murder rate as suffering "due to poverty" in the context of South Africa doesn't pass the sniff test.
Indonesia's GDP PPP is similar to SA's, but it's safer than some western European countries in terms of murder rate.
Closer to home, Namibia has compatible income inequality, but around a third of the murder rate.
In South Africa around 70% of murder victims knew the perpetrator [1]. It seems safe to assume that most of that's within a similar income bracket. Just that statistic seems to discount some wider societal forces as the primary driver.
1. https://issafrica.org/iss-today/what-do-we-know-about-murder...
Makes life much more meh.
FWIW I think Texas had rolling blackouts in winter last year, similar to ZA load shedding. Will likely happen again this winter unless they manage to link into other states' grids (IIRC). Would be interesting to see some kind of comparison between the Texas and ZA electricity problems. Undoubtedly also a lot of corruption involved there.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Map-of-the-North-America...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_13–17,_2021_North_Ame...
It affected more than just Texas lol
Lack of national identity and the dominance of kinship relations in potitics (in SA of course the apartheid history being a big contributor to this), forms the basis of kleptocracy and factionalism, also observable in Latin America. When private relations start to override loyalty to the commons, people start to rob the state.
Ideologically the anti-colonial, politically Marxist but economically flexible model is pretty decent as far as development goes, many Asian countries can attest to that. I think SA's problems are mundane really in the sense that it's easy to diagnose but hard to fix. A divided population and an incompetent leadership, it's sadly not extraordinary.
I think blaming Apartheid for the current ills 30 years after its end is not right.
the ruling party embraces fragments of political systems they observe, as a child might mimic their favourite tv cartoon character, but at the end of the day the jangling discord of kleptocratic nihilism drowns out whatever character features the government hopes to project abroad.
This is notwithstanding the shenanigans that occur at election time. Likely not outright election rigging but there is certainly a lot of pressure and threats of violence on voting day (and also free t-shirts and mattresses).
disclosure: I am South African
Without the current "leading up to the day" pressures would it be fair to say the populist vote is strong in this direction enough to carry the next forseeable election?
I just wonder as I've known 2 people from SA and I neither seemed a fan of the ANC and the rep it was getting for the country internationally. Both of different race backgrounds although I doubt it mattered.
The DA is historically a white party but mostly has black leadership now. It's _mostly_ unaffiliated with the National Party (ruling party during Apartheid) but still has the stigma among most of the population as being the "white party".
The EFF on the other hand is the real populist winner lately. They're extremely left leaning (Marxist-Lenin inspired) and want to nationalise most businesses (including mining) and get rid of all white capital ownership. I wouldn't be surprised if they continue to gain more power - they're purpose built for the current SA population.
But also 1 thing to keep in mind is that the people you've met are probably not representative of the vast majority of the country.
As long as that remains the DA will be a special interest party that won’t get enough votes to be able to govern the country.
It’s a pity, because we really need sane alternatives to the ANC with broad appeal.
As for the EFF, while they would in theory be well-placed to take advantage of this their growth rate has been much smaller than you’d expect. They’ve made many missteps that have plateaued their level of popularity. That might change in future of course.
The DA is not doing itself any favours though, with Zilles gaffes and how often it sheds black leaders - how many have been ejected now after factional battles? 3 in 6-ish years?
Oh I would assume not, nor would they pretend to have been. That's why I was curious was it a coincidence or a product of them being in academia. (Bit of both I suspect)
There really is not single politically party that enough support to get more votes than the ANC, whose share of the vote has been dropping steadily by 3-5% every 4-year election cycle.
Thanks for letting me know :)
It is sort of similar in how many nation building projects of the west have failed in recent times, because the people put into positions of power, weren't in power before for a reason which is usually tied to their incompetence.
Also up where I live there's still anger over the layoffs. For a lot of people HP was something more than a job, but more like the hub of their entire community.
Private sector experience can sometimes translate well, I've seen it in my country in a few places.