Top recipe: you force some people to have a very shit life, selection based on race. Some lawlessness is naturally bred and in some cases encouraged. You then take away the rules that made it shit but you leave the economic, societal and mental damage of a polarised society. You start uplifting people but you mainly focus on a small group and do little to help most people. You allow education to go south because teachers are unionised and you want their votes. You demonstrate corruption at the highest levels and then dismantle the parts of the law meant to fight it. You let the economy grow too slowly because you’re so focused on cutting pieces of the pie for yourself that you forget to grow it. You let public health and policing go to waste, so only wealthy have access to good healthcare, education, security. You break the electricity generation capacity through corruption. Poverty never really gets fixed because a kid in a rural village has a massive hill to climb to be economically active. You also add other broken countries nearby so you end up with a lot of job seekers. Add some resentment of those people.

The kids who make it through all that to e.g. get a job in a bank are absolute heroes.

Great question. https://www.amazon.com/History-South-Africa-Fourth/dp/030018... is an excellent book that digs in on this and other topics about SA if you’re interested in learning more about this extremely complex question and country. As residents often say, it’s especially a heartbreak because the country has so much going for it.

Quite a few contributing factors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iiny1GrfhYM

America, except the natives you stole the land from and the black people you enslaved are one and the same, and Jim Crow didn't end until after the Soviet Union fell/Transformers aired, and you're on a continent that the West has a pathological inclination to exploit.

The righteous fury of those denied the dignity of land and agency burns a cultural brand into the skin of the body politic, an endemic disregard for the "rules-based order" that orders them to the back of the line (however it's said and whoever has the megaphone). The people who benefit, only willing to provide an an ounce of the pound of cure necessary, mask-and-hazmat-suit-up to weather the plague they wrought. It looks ridiculous because it is.

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2014/5/13/oscar-pistorius...