16 years is really *not *a long time.
BTW, I just rented Invictus. Interesting picture of South African life. It seems to be the brightest country in the world, during the daytime – the ground always dusty and the sky always cloudless.
The sky is one of the things I missed the most when living in London - the European sky always seems lower and darker somehow…
You don’t think those of us who could leave (as I could) stay here *because of *the crime and poverty, right? We stay here because it is God’s Own Country.
My personal belief is that humanity became cognitively modern on the SouthernAfrican coast, and as such, there’s something about the environment that is just…right. That sings in our genes. But that’s just *my *weird belief.
#244 reported
Of course if Julius Malema gets into power, South Africa will either go the way of Zimbabwe or explode into a full-blown civil war.
With all due respect, I did not mean “brightest country in the world” in a good way at all. I have to wear sunglasses to go outside here in Florida; SA would drive me crazy!
Well then, the last week of clouds and intermittent rain here in Cape Town would make you happy. It’s not always bright. 
ETA: Cape Town’s climate is very similar to, for example, that of Santa Barbara, CA.
Julius Malema is not going to get into power any more than Sarah Palin is, and for the same reasons.
Neither the American people nor the South African people can claim never to have elected an idiot to the presidency.
Oh, we’ve *had *idiots - but Melema is not the idiot-of-choice of the people with real power *or *the majority of his own party. Like Palin,he’s a troll with a small and yet vocal following that is only a subset of his Party as a whole, and that is quite disliked by other elements within his own party. The other tripartite alliance members, Cosatu and the Communist Party, for instance, *really *doesn’t like Malema because, for all the “take back the farms/mines” rhetoric, he’s actually a wannabe-plutocrat who has been caught with his hands in the tender-till. He’ll never be President without their support - the alliance will collapse before that happens.
I note that this alliance, despite including the Communists and the trade unions and despite being in power since 1994, has not made SA much more Communistic – has it? Why not?
(I remember Jesse Helms on the floor of the Senate, protesting that sanctions on the Apartheid government would usher in “Commernist rule.”)
A little - we are more of a welfare state than we were under apartheid - government grants, free basic housing, free legal minimum of water and electricity, that sort of thing. But no, not a lot. That probably is because the ANC itself isn’t a Communist party, and it’s the major partner. Nor is CoSATU exactly a Communist organisation (in fact, the National Union of Mineworkers, the biggest CoSATUunion, has directly opposed Malema’s mine nationalisation rhetoric, favouring a strategic public investment model instead.)
Have you ever read Animal Farm? Once the new people in power started living in the posh suburbs and driving the Mercedes and sipping the single malt, suddenly it’s not such an evil thing to not have everything redistributed to everyone. Even Malema knows this - his actual actions and lifestyle are very different from his words.
Well, it sort-of has. But it turns out to be not-so-bad.
So how come SA turned out not-so-bad, and Zimbabwe went straight into the suck?
Several reasons:
[ul]
[li]We’re a much more industrialized nation, less agriculture-dependent[/li][li]We’re a (much) more racially mixed nation. Even our White folks are a pretty diverse bunch (not USA-diverse, but better than Zim).[/li][li]We didn’t have the drastic skills drain Zimbabwe seems to have experienced. We’ve had White Flight (“The Chicken Run”, we call it), but Whites remain ~9% of the population. That means a larger skill base is retained for transfer to other groups.[/li][li]We’re a much wealthier nation[/li][li]We’re less susceptible to nationwide drought effect[/li][li]We have a longer tradition of self-rule (even if highly flawed)[/li][li]We didn’t have an out-and-out civil war within our borders like Zimbabwe did. Not saying our struggle wasn’t as violent, but it was different in tone and locale. And it mostly stopped after White rule ended (Kwazulu-Natal political violence being a notable exception). The same can not be said for Zimbabwe. They went from one bloody civil war to another right away.[/li][li]We’re ruled by an internally-not-all-that-stable coalition, which ameliorates their excesses[/li][li]The ANC has always had some external opposition, (even ones with the right “struggle credentials”, like the PAC), not to mention the IFP & the DA. ZANU-PF had been pretty much it from 1987 until 1999. So in reality, Zimbabwe only had **13 years **of one-party rule to go from OK to suck. [/li][li]We didn’t have Mugabe.[/li][/ul]
I’m not a proponent of the Great Man theory of history by any means, but you can’t make enough of the fact that we had Mandela and they had Mugabe. Now, post-Mandela, you might think there’s nothing stopping our presidents from going that way, but both the variant ideals of the tripartite alliance partners, and established tradition, mean that we’re not really ever going to be the best country for that kind of strongman rule.
Take Zuma as a case in point: he gets by on a degree of charm and some street cred, but he walks quite a fine line between being populist and pragmatic, and it has come back to bite him and his party more than once. He’s definitely no strongman.
It’s long enough to build a power station or two, long enough to build a few schools. Why won’t SA go Zimbabwe? Is it because of the way the ANC has looked ahead and seen that the country’s power requirements would not be met? Is it because the ANC has done such a great job of lifting education and literacy levels in the country?
Oh wait, it didn’t do either, in fact both of these aspects - vital to long-term success - have been sorely neglected. Correct me if I’m wrong, but SA has also gone from net-exporter to net-importer in many agricultural divisions.
Some people may be familiar with the ‘smaller’ issue of Gauteng’s rising acidic groundwater (clearly all the fault of mining corporations and the old regime), and the larger issue of clean water supply in the future.
These are mostly matters the ANC does not concern itself with though; it is far more adept at providing Potemkin solutions and painting pretty pictures for the world to see.
Both of which are happening in South Africa. It’s not the ANC that stalls the procedure for building new power stations.
I know this, I’ve been peripherally involved in both the PBMR and several coal-fired power station EIAs.
So your point is?
Not anything like to the scale they were neglected by the previous regime - where most of the country was not electrified and most of the country didn’t have any functioning schools.
Cite? South Africa remains a nett exporter of agricultural produce even with increased shift overall to industrial and service sector. And you can’t just point at the ANC here and ignore the effects of e.g. climate, White Flight and AIDS in shrinking the Ag. sector.
Pretty much, yes.
Or do you think Acid Mine Drainage happens overnight? The Apartheid government didn’t really have an Environmental Ministry worth mentioning, and the regs back then might as well have been printed on toilet paper. Mines, especially, explicitly didn’t fall under the environmental regs until recently (with ongoing exceptions made for the, still). It’s an ANC-led government that’s been changing that.
Which is hardly a uniquely South African issue. Meanwhile, post-Apartheid, we’ve had several dams built and more on the way (Berg River & Crocodile, to name a couple I have personally been involved in as a service provider)
That’s rich. If anything, it was the Apartheid Government that was concerned with presenting a front. Whites were the recipients of the majority of the benefits in this country. Whether that be electricity, water, education or jobs.
Now that all of that has to go around for everyone, of course there’s not going to be the same high standard as there was when everything was just for the pigs, not the sheep and horses. But for the majority of people, there has been nothing but improvement in all these areas. More people with electricity. More people with running water. More kids in school. More people working in the formal sector. More people paying taxes, too - the ANC doesn’t run the country at the staggering losses the National Party did.
Where did that come from?!
The government did apparently discourage Eskom from building new power plants during the late 90s/early 00s. Though they’re certainly not stalling the process now!
Otherwise, I agree with your post.
Not once their wallets start getting lined with tender contracts. But for the sake of interest, please list all the power stations built in the last 15 years, list total MW output along with the increase in demand in the same time. And then explain load-shedding.
I said I might be incorrect, so I have no cite. Instead I ask you, cite for proving SA is still a nett exporter?
You can’t just make up ad-hoc excuses either. Leave that to the ANC.
:rolleyes: Leave strawmen at the door thanks. I said: “clearly all the fault of mining corporations and the old regime”. What part of that suggests overnight?
Are you an ANC party spokesman or something? That sounds suspiciously like their response when accused of corruption. “oh, it happens in the western world, so what if it happens here too?” Wrong attitude entirely.
The majority of benefits STILL go to a fractional minority, only their label is BEE/AA/EE/etc.
You cannot deny the horrific disparity - still growing - between haves and have-nots, just because the haves are now darker in skin.
In short, you are simply making the same excuses the ANC does for having made such poor strides forward in development, for having neglected vital infrastructure for so long, and for generally just doing a crap job of running the country. Saying it’s better than apartheid is valid on humanitarian levels only, and that is not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether they are leading the country on a path similar to Zimbabwe’s.
However, you justifiably are hung up on pointing out the hateful atrocities of the past, so I’m not sure there’s much point in arguing with you, as you are not viewing the situation very objectively.