As has been mentioned, South Africa wins in both cases. South Africa is by far the continent’s wealthiest country both in total GDP and in GDP per capita.
I’d like to add my little bit of personal observation. I have travelled extensively in Southern Africa and in a quite a few other African countries and the one thing that is noticeable is the general poverty and lack of infrastructure all over Africa. If you travel in SA you will see cities much like European or American cities with well maintained roads, airports, trains and buildings. When you go to most other African countries you will see a major difference. Even the capitals are a mess. Roads, if they exist, are poorly maintained and full of potholes. People live in squalor, in shacks, on the street. Countries that haven’t been ravaged by war have been ravaged by poverty or dictators bleeding the country dry.
Mozambique used to have a bustling capital city called Lorenzo Marques, now called Maputo. It was a great holiday destination and had good hotels, beautiful beaches and excellent Portuguese restaurants. Now it’s a shit hole. The roads are full of potholes, the hotels are abandoned and dilapidated. It looks nothing like you would expect a capital city of a major country to look. I won’t even mention Zimbabwe but if you go to Kenya, Zaire, Congo, Malawi or wherever you see the same.
Some countries that got it right like Namibia and Botswana have relatively small, relatively homogeneous populations. Unfortunately they also have very little else. No real industry, not much natural resources and poor agriculture. So they are still quite poor and have little prospects to grow their economy. The countries with all the resources (like Nigeria’s oil) seem to wallow in corruption and decay.
As an African it is very sad to see the resources of a whole continent being wasted. If you’re ever in Africa you will see the abundance of natural resources, the amazing animal and plant life and the great people all over. It’s just that no one seems to get along long enough to get the continent on track.
Do you mean “so does ours”? Because our BoR doesn’t outlaw race, sex or sexuality-based discrimination. These things are addressed for the most part by the 14th Amendment, which is not part of the BoR, and the three types of discrimination are each handled at a different level of Constitutional scrutiny.
Your country has non-discrimination based on sexual orientation built into it? That’s not the one I’ve read, then. Can you point to where it says this?
Clearly, I disagree. So does most of the civilized world.
Time will tell. It’s probably going to need to be amended too, just like others. Maybe transhuman or AI rights, who knows…
Calling the South African constitution more “advanced” than the American one refers, I believe, not to the actual level of protection of individual rights respected in the jurisdiction, but to the degree of precision with which the statute is worded. South Africa’s constitution is more than 200 years younger than the American one, and during these 200 years jurisprudence and its methodology evolved and progressed. Legal theories which had not been existent in 1787 were developed, or existing ones were advanced by new generation of scholars working on it. This doesn’t mean the American legal system is obsolete; the approach of viewing the constitution as a “living document” and adapting its interpretation to the changes in the world enables a society with an old constitution to remain really advanced (yes, I know that the “living constitution” theory is disputed in the U.S., but it has been applied, although there are several Supreme Court Justices now which discard it).
A country with a younger constitution, OTOH, was able to actually codify recent developments in the wording of the statute, which makes its interpretation and application clearer and less ambiguous. In law schools, I visited seminars headed and read articles written by comparative constitutional law scholars who agree that the South African constitution is indeed a very davanced one, codifying a wide range oflegal developments in the past decades. I’ve heard professors calling it one of the most advanced constitutional documents in the world right now (an honor which before the end of apartheid was widely believed to be held by the post-Franco and post-Salazar constitutions of Spain and Portugal).
They have a couple of valuable minerals (diamonds being tops). Otherwise they’re SOL when it comes to water & fossil fuels. Most of the country is arid, and I wouldn’t call sand a valuable natural resource.
First-world nations aren’t based on having diamond mines, they’re based around coal and steel, IMO. Especially when the mineral you’re dependent on is now able to be synthesised, and the entire demand for it is artificial anyway. Botswana’s done very well with what it does have, and mostly been sensible about investing back, but I wouldn’t say it had much natural resources, no.
Indeed, in order to maintain the current rate of fire in the streets of Johannesburg, I believe that the South African Constitution requires that every citizen be armed with at least a semi-automatic handgun and fire it indiscriminately into the air at least five times a day.
Otto, MrDibble: You’re misreading me. The parts about slaves being 3/5ths of a person are not in the Bill of Rights, which has no discriminatory parts at all.
I guess I’m still misreading you. MrDibble is saying that the SA constitution has protection from discrimination on the basis of race, sex and sexual orientation built into its BoR. Your response to that was “Neither does ours,” which try as I may I cannot parse into anything that meaningfully addresses his point. Adding in mention of the 3/5 compromise and noting that it does not appear in the BoR of the US Constitution does not clarify things in my mind as to what you’re trying to say.
MrDibble implied that the American Constitution’s Bill of Rights has “gender-, race- and sexual orientation-based discrimination built into the Bill of Rights from the get-go.” by stating that SA’s Constitution does not. That implication is simply factually incorrect. That is all I was responding to.
It’s interesting. The UK*:America::America:South Africa, in terms of Constitutional jurisprudence.
*(I got the name wrong. I know it. The only rule about the name is “Foreigners always get it wrong.” Change it to “Mornington Crescent” or something and give us fair warning.)
No, that’s not what MrDibble said. He said it has protections from discrimination built in. A lack of protection from discrimination doesn’t imply inherent discrimination.
I’m also just kind of curious about your UK analogy. What is the similarity?
I meant natural resources as in minerals, oil etc. not animals and nature.
In that regard Botswana has an abundance of game parks and nature reserves and they have done an excellent job in preserving this resource. They have concentrated on high end eco-tourism which is more lucrative but also easier on the environment as it is better controlled. There are some amazing places to go visit in Botswana and I highly recommend it.
They also have a fairly small and homogeneous population that are generally better off than most other African countries. They are also well governed with no real political instability.
Notwithstanding all this they still have a far way to go to approach South African standards of wealth or governance, never mind European or North American.
As others have pointed out, that’s not what I was saying, although on reread I think it might have been better phrased as “The South African constitution has non-discrimination on these several grounds: [list]
built into it”.Not an attack on the US one, just pointing out that the SA one covers more ground even if you add the amendments the US one has already undergone.
"Botswana’s economic growth rate-averaging slightly over 7 percent over the past two decades-has been among the highest in the developing world. The mining industry, particularly diamonds, contributes about 35 percent of Botswana’s GDP. At independence, mining contributed only 1 percent of GDP. Manufacturing, construction, and agriculture each contribute about 3-6 percent of GDP, and there has been growth in financial and government services in recent years.
“With a GNI per capita of $4,340 (2004 estimate) using the “atlas method”, Botswana is classified as an upper middle-income country. The government has managed the country’s resources prudently and has kept its recurrent expenditure within its revenue, allowing for investment in human and physical capital. The government’s revenue from diamonds, as well as profits from large foreign exchange reserves of the Bank of Botswana, has largely cushioned Botswana from the recessions that have buffeted most countries in the region.”
Of course the market for those diamonds (which can be synthesized anyway) is artificial so they aren’t like, “minerals” or a real “natural resource.”
Unknown to most foreigners, the UK does have a Constitution. It just isn’t written down anywhere. It is composed of a lot of individual documents all held together by masses and masses of history, precedent, and tradition going (in theory) all the way back to Norman rule beginning in 1066. It seems very slapdash and lax to an American.
Now, compared to the South African Constitution, the American one seems similarly lax and elliptical. I don’t agree with some of the SA Constitution’s positions but they are all written out on paper in one document, as opposed to being hinted at in the main document and written out in self-contradictory detail in 200 years’ worth of court decisions.
