Make your predictions for South Africa for the next 5, 10, or 20 years (maybe even give some advice); but try to justify them with some-sort of rationale…
I’ll start. I think South Africa could be doing way more to provide it’s people with a better standard of education. I understand that this has, somewhat, to do with the strength of the teacher’s unions in South Africa, but the government needs to make this a priority. All n’ all I see big things for South Africa in the future; they are the economic powerhouse of southern Africa (hell, all of Africa) and I see them leading the region in growth and stability.
*****Jeez, he was imprisoned into his 70’s; and he looks like he’s got another 91 years in him! He even out lived Botha. Maybe Mandela owes this longevity to those 27 years of prison (including hard labour). :dubious:
Same old same old, I think. A slight shift to a less mining- and manufacturing-, more tech-oriented economy is going to be offset by the continued brain drain and the education issues you mention. But other than that, South Africa is set to stay pretty much the same, maybe with a slight downturn as the idiots like Julius Malema amass more power. The fundamentals of the economy remain strong, and I can only see commodities (our big earner) getting stronger.
Bad news - The PBMR probably won’t get built, power supply has become somewhat of a concern, as is our piss-poor broadbrand infrastructure.
And - SA power isn’t generally green. We produce a disproportionate share of Africa’s CO[sub]2[/sub] output.
Good news - we might get the SKAR, and even if we don’t, the pilot project (MeerKAT) will boost tech & science industry. Also, I see wind farms and solar as a growth industry.
More good news - I see us getting more and more integrated. Basically, all the racist whiners will have fucked off overseas (and good riddance to them), leaving people who are willing to make a go of things.
Actually, compared to even 5 years ago, he looks like he’s going to croak at any minute, IMO.
I never met a South African until a couple of weeks ago. She was a white of British descent, from Durban.
When I asked her why she had come to America, she said, “Poverty.” She told me that whites have a hard time finding jobs because it is the law there that you must hire ten blacks for every one white.
I had a really hard time swallowing this part, but she said that education for blacks as well as whites now is worse than in the apartheid days. When I asked why, she said that blacks used to have free school uniforms and free transportation to the schools, whereas now they have to pay for them and often can’t afford them. (I can’t remember if she said that the school itself is also no longer free). I asked why that happened, and she blamed the collapse of the tax base from richer people, especially whites, leaving the country.
This came as something of a shock to me, as I had thought that South Africa had experienced much less “white flight” than other African countries that had transitioned to majority rule. I asked her about that, but she really couldn’t compare South Africa’s experience to other countries’.
The education bit is almost impossible for me to believe, but I hesitate to dismiss the report of somebody who actually was on the scene, when I have no personal knowledge of South Africa at all.
Why is this hard for you to believe? It makes perfect logical sense.
Education is tied to economic prosperity, economic prosperity was tied to the whites. Get rid of whitey, and you lose all of the positive things he brings as well as the negative ones. It’s the same as what happened with the farms in Rhodesia. One minute the country is exporting food - exporting it to the whole continent of Africa - and the next, it’s starving. But those evil white farmers were kicked out so I guess that makes it OK.
Well, education is potentially tied to economic prosperity, but I had thought that the blacks had been systematically denied education under apartheid, as they were in slave days in the USA (which was also prosperous).
And the very fact that whitey was “got rid of” was what surprised me. I had thought that Mandela had been far more successful in enticing whites to stay and defusing feelings of vengeance by the black population. Of course, Mandela’s been out of power a while now.
“The same?” That’s a wild exaggeration. Nobody, including the lady I talked with, suggests that South Africa treats its whites as badly as Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, nor that its economy is in remotely as bad shape as Zimbabwe’s. No multimillion percent inflation, no incipent famines, no bludgeoning and arrests of opposition party leaders.
I’ve bumped into many white South Africans in both the US and the UK over the last 10 years. In fact, I’ve never met a black South African!
Their reasons for leaving are the same as mentioned above, they feel that blacks are favoured when it comes to jobs. Also, an increase in crime. They don’t feel safe there anymore.
I’m a young white male south african, according to the whiners I should have no hope of employment if I stay in South Africa. The truth is there are a large number of well paying jobs I can walk into right now, because I have a bachelors degree and about five years experience. I know this because my current job is looking a little fragile so I’m looking for alternatives.
The education system for blacks (called Bantu Education) during apartheid was designed for the express purpose of making black people into passive simpletons. Bantu_Education_Act.
South Africa has had less than twenty years to take country setup to support five million whites and turn it into a country that serves fifty million. A lot has already been done to try and bring everyone up to the same standard but the job is not yet finished and it will be at least another two decades before the end is in sight.
P.S. for those of you who have spoken to, or will in the future speak to, ex-South Africans who have no intention of returning home, i.e. not students or someone looking to wonder around the world for a year after school, remember that they have to have a negative view of South Africa in order to justify to themselves why they left because the alternative is that they let their fears and prejudices drive them out.
Do you disagree that there is a lot of crime? Doesn’t South Africa have like the highest rape rate in the world? I sure as fuck wouldn’t live in a place like that. I can’t blame the whites (or blacks, or anyone who can afford to) for getting the hell out!
Frankly, I believe them a lot more when they say they or their friends were the victims of crime than I believe you when you say they’re just prejudiced against black people.
We’re talking about a place where a woman actually received a patent to produce an anti-rape condom that entraps the rapist’s cock with plastic spikes. That is the kind of thing people have to resort to, the rate of rape is so astronomical. I think I read that one in four South African men has raped a woman. One in four! And would you like to walk around the streets of Jonannesburg at night?
There is a lot of crime, but there are also a lot of people trying to make thjings better. There is also the problem that South Africa only got a truly free press after the 1994 elections, and as in elsewhere in the world, newspapers and tv news have discovered that people like blood and fear and violence in their news. So that is what they report on and that is the angle they take when using statistics to generate news stories.
South Africa is a country with massive economic and social diversity this is often forgotten when the crimes stats come out. So the high rate of robbery or rape in a desperately poor community where the gangs are in control is applied to the leafy rich suburb 15 kilometres up the road.
So, for me, the crime rate is roughly equivalent to living in a first world city. For someone living in a squatter camp it is far far worse. Does that mean I want to run to somewhere else, not a chance. But I do want to see the crime situation in poorer areas be brought under control and in a manner that doesn’t require violation of the constitution to do so. Unlike the Police Chief, Bheki Cele, who wants police to shoot first if they feel threatened.
I can see the crime situation improving as the economic situation improves. The situation is bad right now but it is improving and I believe it will continue to improve.
No, that is not the law. Not nearly. And Whites are still the richest South Africans - the CEOs and MDs of most companies are still overwhelmingly middle-aged White men.
Not true.
Not true. If poverty is a problem, exemption can be granted for fees and uniforms. I know this since my daughter just started at a state school and they made all the parents aware of the options should they be in financial need. Also, every child in South Africa can be the recipient of a monthly government grant should they need it, that goes towards upkeep, and more than covers school fees.
That’s odd - post-apartheid, the Revenue Service has actually collected more taxes than ever before, and every year there are more regitsred taxpayers than before. So bull.
The fact is, that the taxes now have to go towards everyone rather than just 10% of the population. That *has *caused a knock on service provision. Me, I think it’s a small price to pay for freedom.
It has, but that smaller percentage was a much larger population, more than all the other countries combines, so even a smaller percentage is a larger number overall.
S’funny, I was only ever raped and mugged during the Apartheid years. Yes, there’s a high crime rate. I question whether it was any better 25 years ago, though. And those world rape statistics don’t count places like the Congo or Somalia, actually.
But you do not live in a place where discussions about crime always have a racial hint about them. That is the way most white South Africans were raised, racism was built into the very fabric of South African society. Tell a white South African that you were robbed and they will unthinkingly assume that the robber was black, tell them that the robber was white and they will react with shock and disbelief.
Thanks for the weigh-in from other South Africans. I had my suspicions about what she was saying, but never having been to the country I wanted to keep an open mind. Now I see my suspicions were justified.
Is the article Kimstu linked to correct that 80% of new hires have to be black (which includes coloreds, Asians, and white females)? Given that the population is less than 10% white, half of whom are presumably female, it would seem to me that the law shouldn’t be that serious an obstacle to white male employment, and no obstacle at all to white female employment. Is that right?
That is right but there are cases were it can appear to be a problem. For example the SA Air Force takes only twenty candidates at a time for pilot training. If you are white then you you are competing for 1 of 4 slots not 1 of 20 and so on for the other race groups according to the Defence Forces recruiting quotas. This gives each group an equal shot, among their race group, at getting in and prevents the intake being swamped by white kids who had better education opportunities.
The long term goal of such policies is distribution of jobs according to population percentages and for such distribution to occur naturally. Unfortuneatly such a distribution will only be possible when all people have equal opportunities in life. Until such time as this is possible the government has to force the issue and mandate employment quotas.
As a teacher of mine explained when I was in high school, it is not enough to level the playing field when one side is dominant because the imbalance will remain. You must tilt the field in the other direction in an effort to smooth things out.
I don’t personally know *any *unemployed White people (who want to be employed, that is), never mind *any *unemployed by politics. And almost everyone I know is White. The only employment where I have seen this (politics, I mean) even become an issue is in academia, where a White (Zimbabwean) friend is unable to be employed in the University department of her preference. But that has more to do with the fact that her distinctly Eurocentric speciality is political suicide in an African-studies-focused literature department that seems just fine with employing Middle-Aged White Men who specialise in Marxist theory and post-colonial studies.
There is affirmative action legislation, yes, but this has never been an obstacle to emplyment for any of my friends. They may miss out on a *particular *job that went to a Black person, but at the level of a University educated professional, this is not a problem - there’s always more jobs. So anyone overseas who say they couldn’t find any job, specifically because of Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment, is a liar or a slacker. Especially if they are a White woman, who are not the target of AA discrimination.
The unemployment rate in Q4 2009 for white South Africans was 4.9%. The overall unemployment rate for the country was 24.3%. (Quarterly Labour Force Survey (PDF), page xi.)
Naturally if you open up to the whole population jobs that were previously restricted to 10% of the population, then there is more competition for those jobs. That doesn’t mean that the 10% is now being discriminated against. White school-leavers with no further education used to be able to get a comfortable job in the government (or the railways) whereas now, of course, there’s a much bigger pool applying for those jobs.
I think a major problem for South Africa’s image overseas is that it is largely shaped by white ex-South Africans. Some of them (not all or most, but it does seem to be a significant fraction) apparently need to justify their decision to leave by painting the worst possible picture that they can of what life is like in South Africa.
To address the affirmative action point - you cannot simplify it to a description like “80% of jobs are reserved for blacks” - it really doesn’t work that way. It’s far more complicated, and it varies from one industry to another, and you really have to be a labour lawyer to explain it in full.
Anecdotally, in the university department in which I study, about two-thirds of the newly hired lecturers in the last five years have been white males. As a white male myself, I have had the entirety of my postgraduate study paid for by the government. I have received several unsolicited job offers, one from a quasi-governmental organisation. (Admittedly, I am in a particularly high-demand field.)