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> Apartheid was clearly immoral, but they handed over the keys to a very productive economy, on land with some of the best resources in the world, on which they had built excellent infrastructure.

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

Have living standards (literacy, health, etc) improved for the nonwhite population in the past 28 years?

This is such an easy argument to throw around. Almost no way to disprove it or address it, and basically sweeps responsibility away from current failings.

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.

It is a complicated set of circumstances to assess. But SA most certainly was a productive economy, even if you account for the abundance of labour.

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?

Unlike the third world countries, the US is in unique situation: the whole world can exchange their real assets(commodities, finished products, etc) for the US dollar. This luxury is not available to any Asian/African country. That's why the USD is called the world reserve currency.

> Within a matter of years we will begin seeing famine; in a nation with some of the best and most abundant farmland in the world.

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.

I agree with your general point but feel that the Netherlands are a poor example to use given their history of colonisation in Africa.

The Netherlands themselves were under military pressure by neighboring countries, Spain, and Britain, and was occupied and starved by Germany in WW2, and had many of their dikes broken.

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?

Apartheid South Africa's economy was already experiencing troubles as far back as the 1970s and 1980s. All of that happened despite a majority of the population being marginalized and mainly used as a cheap source of labour.