South Africa is one of the most beautiful countries on the planet. It has the raw ingredients to be a global economic powerhouse. What its government - and ostensibly the people voting for it - are doing to it is so sad to see.
Meanwhile the Netherlands thrive, despite barely even having land - most of what they have, they had to take from the sea. There are countless similar examples - it seems resources and land quality have precious little to do with prosperity.
Colonization is more an expression of prosperity, rather than its cause: to colonize, a country already has to be well developed and with a strong military and navy. Ask yourself: with Africa's resources and size, why didn't it colonize Europe, instead of the other way around?
South Africa was no “very productive economy”. The engine behind the “very productive economy” country was (almost) free labor.
People always fail to take that detail into account..
You should also remember that resources went to whites mostly during apartheid. That means around 1/5th of the population…
Fixing inequality is really hard
Newsflash to you though, there is plenty of cheap labour still floating around in SA.
Yet the productive are leaving in droves, whilst the racist (literally) black ruling class in power continue to steal and drive the country into nothingness, perpetually throwing out excuses like you are as to why it can't work now.
I can argue that Apple and the iPhone as a product range is riding on cheap labour from Asia. And so are many products the rich world depends on. Would you say the US is not really a productive country because of that?
No. Too many other countries suffered worse and bounced back faster.
> When can one stop blaming the apartheid?
It will never happen. While the voters are all tribal in their support, the one thing they mostly agree on is racially-based legislation. In such an environment you do not expect the voters to ever dig themselves out of this.
> Instead of blaming, what mistakes that the post-apartheid governments have committed? Sure, corruption is one. How about competence? Competence and corruption can co-exist, though.
For example?
One issue with apartheid is that it essentially withheld education from the black population. Sure, it had schools for them, but they were nothing like the standard of the schools for white children.
So what's an example of a country with an essentially uneducated population of tens of millions who "bounced back(?) faster"?
(I'm German, in case that matters).
Looking at contemporary Poland, one would hardly believe that the country was a heap of ruins and dead bodies mere three generations ago.
They literally built everything after the war and transformed Poland in a country where no one was jobless or homeless a decade after ww2.
Socialism was a godsend (socially and economically) in after-war Poland and so was getting rid of it 4 decades later and later joining the EU.
Don't lecture me on "socialism being a godsend". I saw it with my own eyes. It was a dirty, suffocating, ossified structure where prosperity was a crime, and so was any freedom.
We had martial law between 81 and 83 which made life difficult, as you can imagine a martial law can do, but no one was starving.
You could have bread and milk in the official grocery stores, as long as you were willing to rise early and stand in queue. By 10 am, already sold out.
Buying meat, IIRC, was already somewhat of a challenge. The authorities tried to "re-educate" people towards canned fish.
But the black markets were huge. Impressively huge. You could buy a lot of stuff there, plus sometimes peddlers went door-to-door selling stuff from their backpacks.
Queues existed, this is also true, but again, those were limited to certain rare periods.
Edit: I have completely forget that whole Eastern Block was not allowed to accept Marshall Plan from political reasons and help from Soviets was not really there.
German socialists were rejecting cooperation with Soviet Communists as early as May 1945.
New authentic German parties were organized in June 1945. The CDU was organized (in the Soviet zone) by merging Catholic and Protestant parties that existed in Weimar Germany.
One of the earliest political controversies was whether the surviving July plotters (“Operation Valkyrie”) or Weimar politicians should lead the German people.
The Allied government preferred the Valkyrie plotters. They were sidelined by the politically experienced Weimar politicians.
The Soviets were holding semi-rigged German elections in September 1945. Austria had fair elections by November 1945.
The current German state (“West Germany”) came into existence in 1949. The occupational and autonomous German government existed hand in hand for six years.
It really is amazing how fast “normal politics” resumed in Germany.
South Korea. Took them a couple decades to get moving but once they did they took off like a rocket.
To rephrase the question: “is democracy an end itself, and not just a means to better government?”
The same sort of intrigue that happens in the Chinese Communist Party ruling circles happens in the ANC (not surprising since both are organised under the same principles), meaning that the leader has unfettered power until the next ANC elective conference. Mbeki (competent but with crazy ideas about AIDS that were his undoing) and Zuma were allowed to run amok. Add cadre deployment to the mix, and you can see why South Africa is such a mess…the democratic constitutional order is badly weakened when the electorally dominant political party is run as a personality cult.
I expected Cyril Ramaphosa to be more aggressive in cleaning out the rot, and to perhaps reform the ANC structurally, but he seems very tentative…