Africa’s Richest City Is Crumbling Under Chaos and Corruption
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Most of the country was still very beautiful, but man Johannesburg is really run down. My father was there 30 years ago and he couldn't get over how this once beautiful city could have come to this. Vacancies and broken windows everywhere right in the city center.
If you're just looking to go on vacation in the general region, Namibia is a better option in my opinion.
The other fun game is swapping stories about the dumbest way you have shocked yourself on your own fence. Mine was by trying to lift a branch of my fence while barefoot using an aluminum pool pole. I thought my wife had turned the fence off.
And those outages affect the poorest more than anyone else. My wife is from SA, her family is far from rich, but well off enough to afford a generator. It’s not always on, but it really helps bridge the outages when you really need the power.
And before the usual white supremacists show up, yes, it was better during apartheid. Fascinating how you have no issues when you can just cut the power and water etc. to all the blacks in their townships.
Better for WHO is the important thing to remember. An unequal society doesn't get to claim it's better just because a part of it was way better off.
And when you aren't legally mandated to hire a certain percentage of black employees at the power company, regardless of how many have the proper education and training. And then spend even more bringing in foreign contractors to fix their mess.
I’m sure the geography and average people are lovely. But it has a hell of handicap to overcome politically.
The country is beautiful, the people are great. The problem is the politicians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter https://bit.ly/448HJVI
Somalia seems to be pretty close to anarchy. Also maybe Afghanistan after the US exited?
South Africa anarchy will not last and turn into factions
SA is a truly beautiful and complicated place, I really hope they find their way out of this crisis.
You really don't need any more factors than Arpatheid put the country in a bad place and a government that has no interest in fixing anything will not fix that.
These things are very complicated. I dont think ZA or any society should be under apartheid. They could have a popular government and work well, but for some reason they haven't accomplished that. What has to happen I don't know, but I do know that the racists use it as an example to agitate for apartheid again and eventually people are going to get tired of it and attempt to resolve the problems in some way. Ignoring them or simply blaming them on apartheid will only ensure that the wrong solutions are the ones that get implemented. Nobody is willing to have an honest discussion about these problems, they just scapegoat their political opponents, and this is what will prevent a proper solution to anything.
I still have people there, and every time I go visit its in an even worse state of disrepair; quite upsetting.
The Overton Window[0] is set in such a way to perfectly ensure that the decline continues.
Rhodesia never had any racial requirements for voting/representation, at least not until the British insisted on special representitives being created for the black population as a condition of independence (source: Ian Smith's memoirs). They had educational and income requirements in order to vote, and were actively building more schools in majority black areas in order to increase the ability of black citizens to vote (and to have a better education/life in general).
First of all, as an outsider, no, I don't know why it's happening. Secondly, the way it's carefully couched to avoid stating an actual reason, appealing to how they're "not allowed to say it", makes it sound like the real thing they want to say is something over-simplistic and extremely bigoted like "It's because of all the Blacks." So I'll leave my downvote, thank you.
Why is the town of Orania so beautiful, clean, and prosperous while the rest of South Africa is like this? You can watch videos of it on YouTube, it is very nice. Compare it with black towns or major cities in greater South Africa.
Orania is a “whites only” town of about 2500 people. They don’t abuse or extract resources from blacks, they just live separately.
This is the kind of dangerous question that GP is saying one is generally not allowed to ask.
"The average wage in Orania was estimated at approximately R94,036 per annum in 2019, low by White South African standards. In 2016, CNN reported unemployment in Orania at 2%. In 2015, a visiting journalist estimated the poverty rate at 70–80%"
That seems to be similar:
"Annual household income for blacks stood at an average of 92,893 rand (about $7,000)"
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-safrica-economy/black-sou...
Orania has 2066 people, and a third of them are children. That leaves 1363 adults. The official stats say there are only 609 people employed there, which means less than half of the adults work. Combined with making their own currency, elections, not having any real police force or public services, and the rest of SA basically leaving them alone, this all screams "racist white people with a lot of money who want to roleplay Fallout mixed with Atlas Shrugged".
How is that relevant when GP was saying that it's wealth that makes the difference, but the stats show equivalent wealth between the two groups we were talking about: Oranians and black South Africans.
The point is that by the data, these two groups aren't wealthy, there's nothing to suggest that Oranians have "a lot of money", and thus GP's assertion is incorrect and was just a random claim not backed by the data.
The idea is usually that you can then use the downvotes as "evidence" of your correctness (of course, that's fallacious - downvotes can be for anything, and an antagonistic tone combined with portraying yourself as the underdog is one of the most prominent examples, regardless of the content of your post). And if you don't get downvoted - even better for your case! It's a cheap win-win for you.
because it's a tiny, self-selecting intentional community? i hate to feed the troll, but it's pretty obvious why a small, singular ideology-driven community might appear more "beautiful, clean, and prosperous" than a large metropolis
So, they won’t even approach a conversation trying to determine the actual causes of decline because they feel any possible explanation is going to be racism-adjacent.
It kept a vast part of the country outside of the education needed to work the jobs that produce the highest values (finance, business, etc).
So yeah the "observation" is correct, except the implication of it is not.
Note that I imply nothing and the statement is a simple, albeit troubling, fact.
How do you propose that the discussion of decline in South Africa is framed so it doesn’t devolve into people screaming “that’s racist!!”?
Words have implications. This is one of those fallacious "but it's true" things, where it honestly becomes difficult to give the speaker the benefit of the doubt - i.e. that you think the phrase "South Africa was [insert anything positive] under Apartheid", by itself, has no possible implications.
Reframe the statement so some discussion on decline can proceed without triggering anyone.
It's incredibly easy to have a conversation about how to improve SA without taking needless diversions to support racist institutions. All you have to do is talk about potential solutions to current problems. That's it. That's all it takes.
Bringing up historical racist institutions is a good way to derail and shut down reasonable discussion.
Other African nations that didn't have Apartheid or similar institutions have similar economic and political results. And even the one sub Saharan nation that didn't experience colonization, Ethiopia, isn't screaming ahead of its neighbors economically or otherwise. Its GDP per capita is slightly ahead of Uganda's and fairly far below Kenya's.
Countries that have developed in the last 60 years tend to have strong authoritarian leaders and the favor and interest of Europe and the United States.
Ethopia does have natural resources but it doesn't have a strong central government, partly because the warring factions want control of the resources. Places like UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar had strong dictators before they developed the petroleum industry. African states that have oil tend to be too weak politically to resist outside interests taking the wealth by paying bribes and funding warring factions.
Also what point are you trying to make here? You seem to be implying a common cause for these results. Care to explicitly state it?
Sometimes when the house is on fire, you just get everybody out. Instead of 'waiting for the fire brigade' or 'somebody smarter than you needs to make that decision'.
I'd hate to be that generation of young people condemned to a violently racist system because, it was going to be difficult for the rich to adjust.
And now, Joeburg is on fire and the fire department is no longer able to put out the fire because of incompetence and mismanagement.
I agree with the other poster: what, exactly, is your point? I agree that the Overton Window is probably stifling some crucial conversations here, but your comment, as is, leaves open many racist implications.
Just look how economically thriving Mozambique and Angola were, and what happened after they gained independence from Portugal.
South Africa is another example in that long list.
Hell, just look what happened with Libya and Iraq after their dictators, who subdued the masses but kept the peace, were disposed of respective being helped in their disposal by the US government.
This is needlessly tribalistic. This is "not liked" by some people, because of the implications for which it is most often used as a stand-in. Even the right-wingers I know admit this dishonesty when they see it committed. In other words, they "don't like it". (I'm not accusing you of this particular dishonesty - I'm just criticizing your framing)
If you really want to make things better then you focus on the question "How do we make it better from where it is now?"
Given my own experiences from travelling to 43 countries, the difference in drive, willingness to work, abilities or lack thereof / lazyness shown in daily life is certainly very visible between Africa and Asia, Europe, America.
The idea that everyone is a blank slate wrapped in different colors of skin seems quite reductive, if not insulting to the beauty of human diversity, given the real science behind genetics.
The left often doesn’t want to critique ideas because they conflate that with cultural bigotry, especially if the ideas are linked to things like religions. The right doesn’t like the ideas explanation because they believe in biological determinism and think it must be race.
Find an image of North and South Korea from space. Those people are genetically almost identical. What’s the difference? Ideas.
Why did Europe suddenly become the worlds powerhouse right after the enlightenment when before it was poorer than many places in Asia and the Middle East? The ideas changed.
Have the dominant ideas and mentalities in South Africa changed? How? That’s the question I would ask.
I'm assuming (and hoping) you mean culturally identical because all humans are nearly genetically identical.
>Those people are genetically almost identical. What’s the difference? Ideas.
And trade sanctions, and the support of super powers.
>Why did Europe suddenly become the worlds powerhouse right after the enlightenment when before it was poorer than many places in Asia and the Middle East? The ideas changed.
I guess it was a 'change in ideas', it also might have had to do with colonization of the practice of exploiting poorer countries and repatriating their wealth.
The Ciskei experiment: a libertarian fantasy in apartheid South Africa
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2023/mar/23/the-ciskei-expe...
> In the 1980s, South African libertarians set up a deregulated zone that they sold to the world as ‘Africa’s Switzerland’. It was a sham, but with its clusters of sweatshops, it was very modern – and in some ways it anticipated the world we live in today
here's an article from nearly 10 years ago warning about a grid collapse - https://mg.co.za/article/2014-12-11-does-south-africa-face-a...
this was after being warned years prior and having similar issues as early as 2008. SA is going to collapse and my bet is China will buy everything up for pennies like they've done in other countries. SA citizens will probably be better off honestly
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33684992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33685959
essentially graft on an enormous scale so that after $40B of investment, the monopoly power company generates significantly less power than 15 years ago. Meanwhile, the entirety of society has had to structure itself to accommodate 4-6 hours of blackouts per day, with a stunning level of required individual investment in batteries, solar, generators, etc.
And now the power company is struggling to just regularly have 4-6 hours of blackouts per day.
Amongst many other problems this includes a policy of cadre deployment. I.e the party faithful running all state institutions which are legislated to be monopolies as much as possible. Naturally the party faithful have zero skill in running the institution and need to deal out massive amounts of patronage to keep in favor. This includes all senior members of the justice cluster as well obviously. Even a saint would be corrupt in this environment.
The old apartheid government were also heavily corrupt but managed to at least make sure state institutions were run by semi competent people and kept a limit on the amount of corruption.
The ANC is also learnt from the apartheid government and like the good racists they have become have also steadily replaced staff of the wrong race in those institutions but haven't bothered worry about knowledge transfer so all the old seniors engineers who knew how and why things work are gone.
It's one thing if government is corrupt, and the brother / kid is getting kickbacks, and maybe users pay 20 or 30 or even 100% more than it should ideally cost. That's a problem. It's a whole different story if the government is corrupt, and you're paying the corrupt price, and you don't even get the electricity.
All of the pressure on South Africa in the 80s to end the apartheid and once it happened those countries abandon South Africa aside from leaders appearing in photos with Mandela.
No one is allowed to question the governing party and pressure to reform doesn't exist from external countries for fear of being labelled racist. In the end the poorest suffer.
This is a problem that South Africans need to work out themselves. I wish them success.
Corruption seems like it's become endemic, and with it the infrastructure, economy, etc.
Either way - he's spot on, this entire country has been crumbling since the mid 90's and the only thing keeping it from becoming another Zimbabwe or Somalia is the sheer momentum of the invested capital and the stubbornness of the productive individuals here. Many of which simply emigrate year after year, making the problem worse as the ratio of unproductive to productive grows greatly.
I've been watching it first hand since I moved here almost 2 decades ago. Unfortunately it's a very nice country, so much potential for year-round farming, so much solar, enterprising and self-sufficient populace, rich culture, etc, so it's sad to watch it become this way.
Violence wise, I'd rather live here than in places like London or most of the places in America with high thug-culture populations.
Because that's _exactly_ what we'd say about those other countries. Stay out of the dodgy areas etc, the gang violence etc is typically hyper local and worst in certain neighborhoods.
South Africa murder rate 2022/23: 46 per 100,000 (https://www.groundup.org.za/article/how-bad-murder-in-south-...)
England and Wales murder rate 2021/22: 11 per million (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand....)
I'm not saying SA doesn't have crime, I'm saying it's easy to avoid and I prefer it this way vs what is present in supposedly western countries.
There is nowhere in London, or in the UK, that I cannot walk. I'm not sure how you are imagining Western societies.
Ohh it is. Racially charged farm attacks are in the news, but apart from that, violence is very high in the country. Murder and rape crime statistics are some of the highest in the world. And that is after allegations of corruption and underreporting of crime.
If you have a preference for living in higher violence areas, that's your choice, but I don't think many will share that view.
As one other comment had pointed out, the murder rate in SA is about 40 times that of England. It isn't even comparable, so I don't see how one can make a solid argument for "but violence-wise, SA is better despite having an x40 murder rate".
Seems they all knew the writing was on the wall even back then.
How does one even break out of that cycle? Who is the first one to say "I'll give up my corrupt riches so everyone can have a more functioning society?"
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0d/S_...
My brother in law does land evaluations nation-wide. One of many examples he gave me was that there is a program there to expropriate farms from white land owners and give them to blacks (I'm not referring to the expropriation without compensation FYI). The idea behind this was to give the blacks a way to earn money by being able to have land. He personally observed farms that had been expropriated and it's effect. Before the expropriation they were productive thriving operations, afterwords many ended up ceasing to produce anything and the properties went into dis-repair.
Farms, beyond supplying the country with food provide a valuable export.
Big farms have become big, to compete on margins. Splitting them is a recipe for disaster. No surprise when it goes sour, quickly and decisively.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
> It is found that South Africa has experienced many of the symptoms outlined in the resource curse literature including relatively slow GDP growth, gross inequalities, entrenched poverty and the creation of a rentier state. Overall, it is concluded that South Africa has failed to benefit from natural resource wealth and can be classified as a resource cursed state. Not only has mineral wealth failed to benefit much of South Africa's population, sections of society have actually been harmed through the process of mineral extraction
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curseMix that with globalization and the fact that the only "profitable" industries are the ones that are mainly for white workers, you end up with a situation you can't really "fix".
There Are No Successful Black Nations | And the indignity and helplessness of blacks in America won’t end until we have a first-world African nation to lift up our people.
<https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/4x2vbu/there_ar...>