Three decades on from the birth of democracy in the country, the ANC could see its vote share fall below 50% for the first time.
In a country that became mired in corruption under the former president Jacob Zuma, inequality has soared and a run of two months without power cuts by the state energy firm Eskom is cause for celebration.
So, you know, let’s not elect commies.
Two months without power cuts? Is there an election looming?
We were in SA for a month in Jan/Feb this year. While the African Cup of Nations Football tournament was on loadshedding was for 2 hours a day usually after midnight. When there were no games on TV, then the 2 hours was between 8pm and 10pm. Once the AFCON had finished, it was back to 6 hours a day without electricity.
Thing is, the electorate is not turning from the ANC towards better governance, but towards racist headbangers like Malema and whatever Zuma stands for, presumably lining his own pockets.
Like Mr Crun, I visited SA fairly recently (Jan/Feb last year) and we had power cuts for 2-10 hours each day. It’s a beautiful place, but it’s on the way out. Probably a good time to stock up on the best SA vintages, because they won’t be produced once the farms have been appropriated.
I missed out on the recent SA discussion, but I visited for the first time in 2000 (I think) and have visited half a dozen times since. Over the first visits, you could see things getting better: it got safer, people were optimistic and Mandela had talismanic status. It might have been coincidence, but it all seemed to go downhill when he died.
I have no idea what the solution might be. I always thought dividing the nation, essentially to create a Western/Eastern Cape state with a balanced mix of black/white/coloured would have been the solution, leaving the rest of the nation to the Zulus and others. However, that state would have seen floods of immigration and ended up in the same state as the rest.
“Wearing a keffiyeh”.
In South Africa. Who’d have guessed?
Communism mixed with low IQ African tribalism stirred up with racial hatred. It’s a heady combination!
My mate is from Namibia – his 80+ year old parents still live on the ‘small’ family farm of about 30,000 acres (on land shit enough to support a couple of hundred beef cattle). Even in Namib his parents sleep in a razor wire compound, with guns by their sides and ‘night dogs’ outside.
They didn’t have electricity on the farm until 1985 or so, but then the overhead lines were installed. Thereafter they were repeatedly removed for the metal by the locals. So now they don’t have electricity again, other than that produced by generators.
It’s not that dissimilar to transplanting modern Britons to the Britain of 3,000 years ago. The locals would have been ignorant, superstitious, violent, and uneducated. They’d have wanted shiny things and metal they could sell for shiny things.
Unfortunately we can’t co-exist with people like that.
It’s not that dissimilar to transplanting modern Britons to the Britain of 3,000 years ago.
Enterprising time traveller makes fortune with Max Factor woad. “Stay blue all day, won’t run or smudge.”
@Otto…
Traipsing about in England in the near-nude, they wouldn’t need woad in order to stay blue!
I don’t think it was a case of them being commies, just absolutely totally and completely corrupt and they saw the public sector as a huge trough. That’s the problem if you don’t have the smarts to make it in the private sector and you have the contacts, the state is there to be stolen from. As everyone is doing it, no one complains.
My parents live in a small town where the opposition got into power a few years back and have swung from a huge deficit to a surplus just by cutting out the corruption. And things are being done in the town, like potholes being fixed, amenities upgraded etc. Needless to say, the local ANC cadres have painted a target on the opposition pols backs.
Or by Rimmel
“Get the Llyn Dun look.”
So they’re going to vote for the “kill the boer and take his farm” party rather than the “evict the boer and take his farm” party?
It’s a big place. Central government is so useless its absence wouldn’t affect service delivery and its disappearance would save money and prevent signing ridiculous treaties on our behalf like decommissioning coal powered electricity generators or deals with B&MGF to produce mRNA vaccines for Africa. The Western Cape works well with good infrastructure except that which government monopolises like power and water. If SA just fell apart into its natural divisions some places would do well. Keeping taxes where they will be productive rather than stolen is a plus
I went on a Social Walk recently and was chatting with a lady (whose husband regularly beats me in races whereas she never does, but seems not to mind) from South Africa and she mentioned that while she was staying with her mother (and father but he didn’t matter in this context) to give birth a gang was breaking into all the houses in the street and only because she couldn’t sleep and heard them and screamed she was rescued; on another occasion when she and her husbnd were asleep a(?nother) gang broke in and stole all her jewellery (the sentimental value being greater than the cash value). She stated that she has good reason to be scared of Blacks [I have seen various paler shades of africans and slightly darker Tamils, so race *can* be a “Social Construct” if you are not a Basque who have scientific evidence].
Communist ideology encourages and is used as an excuse by greedy individuals to steal from those who have worked and saved for the future (in most/many societies young women, while they are working, buy jewellery that they can sell if their husbnds die or do not earn enough to support them and their children when they are unable to work).