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>Most of the population has no credit history and those who do use credit sparingly and find it hard to get

I don't agree with you here. The entire furniture retail industry is based on selling goods on credit to poor people. The National Credit Act tightened lending up, and reduced some of the more blatant exploitation, but it is very easy to get credit, if you want it.

>Paying taxes in the USA is 61 vs South Africa's 23? No way. Paying your taxes in South Africa is a serious pain in the behind - I continue to do it. We file our USA C corp and personal corp taxes ourselves each year and it's a breeze in the States.

I am surprised that you consider tax in South Africa to be more complex than the US. Could you elaborate?

South Africa's ranking is likely to fall in the next survey. There have been recently been well publicised cases where company directors have been fraudulently replaced at CIPRO, the government agency that handles these registrations, due to a lack of adequate controls. The directors are replaced and the bank accounts are emptied (the new "directors" get signing powers at the bank) before anyone realises what's happened.

The Deeds Office (land registry) has also has had fraudlent land transfers going through, and although stealing land is more difficult that hijacking a company, it has happened, with complicity between crooked lawyers and corrupt officials.

In most cases these hijackings, of land, and of companies, have been reversed by courts, but the time and expense of going to court could cripple a small business.

If you start a business in South Africa, and decide to incorporate, you should make sure you verify directors regularly, watch your business bank accounts closely, and hope that the government sorts out the mess (there are new controls that are being introduced already at CIPRO).

>Paul Graham wrote a while ago about the "Trouble with Segway" From the linked article: "But when he rides the Segwell, they shout abuse from their cars: "Too lazy to walk, ya fuckin homo?"

Is it routine in that area for adults shout abuse at strangers minding their own business?

Regarding class sizes, I refer you to the recent news about Gates Foundation findings regarding class size, versus teacher quality. Large numbers of poor/mediocre teachers and small class sizes are not necessarily better than good teachers with larger class sizes.

South Africa's densities are low because of apartheid planning. Segregation trumped density or sustaintability.

Freight rail has indeed declined in South Africa, partly because of corruption, but the neglect started many years before. South Africa's railway rolling stock is, on average, decades old, so the lack of investment in rail, and promotion of road transport, started long before the present government took over.

The lower life expectancy is due to HIV/Aids and it is similar to neigbouring countries. In the (highly unlikely) event that the Apartheid government had survived, I doubt that the life expectancy figures would have been much better. (And the AIDS epidemic took hold under the apartheid government).The infant mortality rate remains better than the world average.

The Apartheid regime was not viewed as a benevolent dictatorship by the majority of South Africans (or the rest of the world), so comparisons to Singapore are spurious. Instead, Apartheid was an organised state policy to further the interests of white people, at the expense of all others, monopolising the wealth and resources of the country, while throwing enough crumbs at a deliberately dumbed-down black population, to keep them docile.

>But the problem is that we do not need the best teachers in the world, we need a lot of teachers. A good teacher in a class of 40 doesn’t help a thing.

The conventional wisdom on class sizes is being challenged currently.

>Hendrik Verwoerd was not the be all and end all of the NP government. You know that many of the policies changed after him?

In the 1970's, well after Verwoerd's demise, a black child's education got 10% of the funding given to a white child.

>There are many reasons why those businesses moved (from high crime to non-functioning municipalities). The fact of the matter is that work and businesses are now far from where many employees work. So they have to rely on non-existent transport (such as taxis or horrible metro lines) each day to commute 30km+.

This is a rather strange argument. The reason why blacks, Indians and Coloureds have historically lived so far from their workplaces is that the apartheid government (literally) forced them out of urban centres and onto the periphery of urban areas.

Transport infrastructure was neglected for 20 years, starting in the 1980's, and continuing under Mandela and much of Mbeki's tenure. The taxi industry/mafia was deregulated in the late 80's by the apartheid government. Car-centric urban sprawl also first took hold under the apartheid government (even today, mass transit between the black areas of Soweto and white-flight Sandton, established in the late 70's is nonexistent).

If the Apartheid economic model of decentralised and seperate development was so worthwhile, why was did that government have to run up massive deficits to support the system? Communist countries also enjoyed low unemployment, just as Apartheid South Africa did, thanks to similarly massive misallocations of resources, and coercion, in pursuit of a failed ideology.

Apartheid was declared a Crime against Humanity, with good reason. The only place where pro-apartheid revisionism gets much currency is in obscure corners of the internet.

Regarding the consolidation of universities, I wouldn't take Zuma too seriously (I have to wonder he was motivated to say that by individuals who lost power through the consolidations, and in any case Zuma was in Cabinet and didn't voice any objections at the time). There was a lot amount of duplication between racially segregated institutions, and cutting administration costs is a good idea. The merging of teacher training colleges into universities may be more problematic, but overall, in South Africa, the less institutions, the less chance for waste and looting. I also have to wonder how good the teachers produced by those colleges really were.

>Bantu education was inferior, that is a fact. But it is a >question of resources. ... >White people almost exclusively pay taxation (as is still >more or less true today).

Hendrik Verwoerd's comments about Bantu education clearly indicate, that it was about more than resource constraints http://africanhistory.about.com/od/apartheid/qt/ApartheidQts... Per capita spending on education for black children was 10% of that on white children. I do agree the Outcomes Based Education (introduced by Asmal's predecessor, if I recall correctly), has been a tragic waste.

The idea that blacks didn't contribute to the tax base, and were not therefore entitled to its benefits is absurd. They were systematically excluded from economic opportunity, so they couldn't contribute, even if they wanted to (and they have always payed sales taxes).

>Migration is a natural cause of South Africa’s >industrialization. The population is still rural and >development is in the cities.

Migration and the migrant labour system are two very different things. The Apartheid ideal was black men in hostels, black women and children in Bantustans.

The rural industrial development was worthy, and it is regrettable that it has been abandoned, but one has to question the sustainability of those developments. Their motive, like much development in apartheid South Africa, was to further racial segregation by keeping the races apart. If they had provided job opportunities close to major economic centres, those jobs might have proved to be sustainable.

Your rant doesn't mention that benign-sounding "separate development and rule for all ethnic and cultural groups" under Apartheid forced blacks onto 13% of the land, even though they formed by far the largest population group in South Africa.

Nor does it mention the fact that generations of blacks were forced by state policy into inferior "Bantu Education". Nor does it mention the fact that the migrant labour system, coupled with the other degrading laws to deprive blacks of economic and social freedom helped wreck the fabric of black society.

I am as disgusted by the current ruling party's corruption as anyone, and I am appalled by the way the west generally seems to turn a blind eye to its massive failings.

Apartheid was designed to turn black people into failures, and into an exploitable manual labour pool. And any attempt to decouple apartheid from its aftermath is, at best, highly inaccurate.