Why South Africa Is on the Brink of Chaos

After viewing dozens of his videos, I get the impression Serpentza is a paid propagandist. Take his claims with a heap of skepticism.

And unlike weather forecasting, communism ending in failure is a 100% certainty. Yet communists somehow are able to take the moral high ground. We have advanced well beyond the middle ages where it was reasonable to hold intellectual and political elites to moral standards.

Idk.

Using HDI [0] you can see that ZA was middle of the pack developmentally in the 90s, but platueaed until 2007, when the commodity boom and BRICS fervor saw ZA's development skyrocket. Yet by 2013 onwards, that development began to plateau again.

Furthermore, ZA is a country that is traditionally compared to other rising economies like China, Brazil, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Thailand, etc. In the 2000s, ZA was far ahead of China developmentally and comparable to Mexico and Brazil, yet all 3 countries have overtaken ZA.

Heck, in 1990 Malaysia, Thailand, and South Africa were all comparable developmentally yet Malaysia and Thailand in 2023 have hit the precipice of becoming a developed country (HDI at 0.8 and above) while South Africa is still stuck.

Even Vietnam, a country that in 1990 was one of the poorest countries in the world has now in 2023 caught up to South Africa developmentally.

This absolutely constitutes a collapse. Mind you it's not as bad as Venezuela's (China in 2023 has only just hit developmental indicators that Venezuela had in the late 2000s and early 2010s, yet Venezuela had regressed to the same level as China in the early 2000s), but it is absolutely a massive regression.

[0] - https://countryeconomy.com/hdi/south-africa

Was anyone pitched in 1994 that "of course we'll have to go through horrible wars for centuries but it will ultimately be worth it"?

apparently SA is on the brink of not doing what the USA tells them to do, resulting in USA media panic on unrelated and long-standing topics

> How have once downtrodden countries like Korea, China, and large swaths of Eastern Europe been able to turn rags into riches while most of Africa has so far failed to?

At least for Eastern Europe, the answer is very clear: the European Union imposing a serious baseline regarding democracy, rule of law and corruption. While Poland and especially Hungary are testing how far the patience of the EU can stretch, in general it's still holding up. On top of that, Eastern European nations/their populations wanted to join the EU desperately, wishing to never experience authoritarian realsozialismus again.

China had an immense amount of young, trainable people and a lack of environmental and worker regulations, which the West was all too keen on exploiting, and established trade routes from UK empire times. That's how they got big.

Africa, in contrast, had and widely still has nothing. No coalition/federation that pushed applicants to improve, no/barely any external interest in the countries, no major trade routes, no one who gave a flying fuck about the entire region. The US largely don't care as long as there is no bad actor threatening their interests (such as ISIS, al-Quaeda and its offshoots), Europe doesn't care about anything but getting rid of migrants no matter what, the Arabs don't care, and there aren't natural resources worth the trouble of extracting them without violating supply chain concerns. The only ones at least caring a bit about Africa as a continent are the Chinese, but they don't care about politics as long as they get a supply of workers and a potential market for cheap crap now that Europe and the US are saturated - we're seeing first signs of that by Chinese fast fashion taking over clothing from Western "second hand" (mitumba) stuff.

IMO the main problem is the arbitrary way borders were drawn in Africa by colonialists. Too many ethnicities that didn't get along very well suddenly shared a common state, while others were split between many countries. When even much richer and educated areas have problems with multiculturalism of much smaller scale (the Balkans, Spain, Belgium for example), it's not surprising that countries like DR Congo with over 200 languages spoken are basically ungovernable through democratic means. The border situation isn't anywhere near as bad in South America and most of Asia - and even there countries which lack common national identity tend to be less stable than others.

Peaceful coexistence of many cultures within the same society is a nice idea, but in reality it's very hard to do right due to the tribal nature of our specie. Highly successful multicultural countries appear to be an exception, rather than a norm.

>"There Are No Successful Black Nations" was the original title of this article in Foreign Policy: https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/08/09/why-black-people-must-h...

I read the article with the original title. Resulting Reddit discussion: <https://np.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/4x2vbu/there_are...>

>It's an uncomfortable title, but it's a truth that must be confronted. How have once downtrodden countries like Korea, China, and large swaths of Eastern Europe been able to turn rags into riches while most of Africa has so far failed to?

It's all of Africa. I was flabbergasted to learn that, contrary to what I'd heard for years about how Africa was poor but rapidly growing, the truth is that Africa is poor and not growing at all. <https://np.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/6krxpv/world_map_of...>

> GDP is not everything of course. But even on measures of safety, why is Africa so much more violent than equally poor Laos or Cambodia?

Can you point to some statistics to back this up? I've lived in Africa for most of my life, and I struggle to see the truth of this. Apart from some countries at war, where is tis extreme violence going on? For what it's worth, I felt far more unsafe when I lived in the US.

Compare how many people were killed in wars in the 20th century, by continent. Africa has been by far more peaceful compared to Europe and Asia; it's not even close.

>but it's a truth that must be confronted

Why? I really do not care anymore. How much have been poured in? How many marshall plans in $? While Germany rose from a bombed out nation in 1945 to the EU's strongest economy?

South Korea too is even more impressive, from an illiterate peasant nation to now with Samsung and all that.

Japan got hit with the most destructive man made weapon, twice. Granted, they were an Asian powerhouse up to WW2.

I think the key is education and "making your own shit". Have any African nations made weapons, planes, tanks, communications equipment, trains, cars, and now computers and phones in the same ilk?

Being Swedish, we are 10milion only and have made planes, submarines, ericsson + vast mining and forest operations with assorted companies. :)

Are we not counting Haiti or Jamaica? If we’re counting “black” as “African”, then yeah. But then “There are no successful African countries” seems a lot less difficult to prove/refute.

People vote for the ANC in SA because there isn't an alternative party at the national level. Once you vote for the party, the party then decides who will lead.

Even the article notes that the first 15 years of ANC rule saw significant development, as does HDI data [0].

The issue was that Jacob Zuma essentially destroyed RSA thanks to his corruption. And the only reason he became President was because he headed the ANC's intelligence department from the 70s to the 90s, and as such had dirt on everyone.

[0] - https://countryeconomy.com/hdi/south-africa

"When people vote for politicians based on moral appeals"

Is this really SA's problem, or rather classical tribalism? "A bastard, but our bastard."

(See also: Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq etc. Not just an African phenomenon.)

it's really not that simple

don't forget the reason people voted for the nazis in Germany was not because they believed in their values but because they seemed competent to change things to the better, while all established parties seemed to not be able to do so

this (in a roundabout way) then put them in a position where they could size the remaining power by force transition into the power which would later start WW2

And it's not just back then. For example today many "right wing" forces in Europe use that arguments too telling people about how they (supposedly) can fix all the issues if you just stop nitpicking about "enter moral/ethic discussion here" and it just because the other parties blocking them for "insert slang for someone overdoing ethical correctness" reasons. Sure all a lie and most thing they propose tend to fall into the category of "looks like it could work until you understand market dynamics a bit better" and similar but people still get tricked.

Just to be clear in some parts of the world there seems to be an issue with political correctness and over policing(A) opinions but this is not a reason to stop putting ethical reasons into the selection of you vote, because AFIK the moment people stop that thing will get way worse.

(A) Like from outside of the US the US seems to suffer from it, but then when looking at inner US news closer I'm not sure if it's an actual issue or just people highlighting the exceptional case instead of the norm and starkly over exaggerating problems.

I have to disagree based on my experience. In my country (South Korea), many have voted for conservative politicians under the notion that while they might be corrupt, they come with long careers inside the government and hence more "qualified" for the job.

More often than not, it turns out these conservatives aren't only more corrupt but actually less competent than their liberal counterparts. Their "successful" past careers mean little when they are built upon backstage deals and friends taking care of friends.

But per them, a short while ago whites were being exterminated and South Africa was facing famine as a result.

Sounds like a pretty good argument that South Africa's previous regime should not have given up power.

This is corruption, not socialism.

Meh I'm from a nation way more socialist than the USA and we have 3x the median wealth per capita (Australia).

We have a much lower mean wealth though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...

If you're one of the top 1% in America life is great. But the 99% should not be going around saying socialism sucks. That to me indicates you're gullibility and mindless support of the 1% who have waaaay too large a share of the wealth. The 99% have a lot of room to increase their wealth in America at the expense of the average by leaning a little more into socialism honestly.