I can say this because, well, I am still here and I am not planning on moving. It of course assumes you have a decent income and that you don't live in a dodgy neighborhood.

Standard of living is very high. As for load shedding, you can easily mitigate this by putting up solar panels on your roof, an inverter and a bunch of batteries. You don't even need to pay right away, you just bake it into your bond (aka mortgage).

Yeah, if you're willing to look the other way and lock your car doors in literally the most unequal country in the world: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gini-coef...

And since you're also a Saffer, I don't need to say anything about the daily threat from crime, and how everyone lives basically in a castle with electric fences. Do you have electric fences and private security? Of course, just like all the other white people in South Africa. Afrikaans was my first language, I know how it is over there.

Sorry but I'm going to have to disagree about "brilliant place to live", having lived in so many countries (including Poland, Czechia, Germany, NZ, England, ...).

I feel like this is a huge exaggeration. I'm extremely far from an expert, but I'm in SA (right now) surfing and it's not that bad everywhere. Cape Town and the bigger cities felt like that, but I went through a bunch of small surfing towns/villages/suburbs and stayed in a bunch of places that didn't have electric fences.

They did have a sticker saying they paid for some security company, but that was it.

The inequality is absolutely disgusting though, I agree. It's such a shame, because it's such an amazing country.

Staying here longer definitely crossed my mind, so I see what people mean by quality of life. The food is amazing, amazing surfing and hiking spots, amazing wild-life, the list goes on and on. I really wish it was possible to fix the inequality, but I can't even begin to imagine what that would involve. I did my best to tip well, but obviously that makes no difference at the macro level.

It's not possible to do that, because the government is fairly and democratically elected[1], and the voters who keep supporting this government are too short-sighted to see that trying to vote themselves more handouts doesn't work in the long run.

[1] When a government stays in power for almost 3 decades, all the while being fairly elected by the voters, and the voters suffer because of it, who exactly are you going to blame? What exactly will you "fix"?

Sure, but isn't private security and gated living (AKA security fences) becoming the norm in most of the middle-class suburbs in many other countries?

> Sorry but I'm going to have to disagree about "brilliant place to live",

Yeah, I wouldn't go so far as to call it brilliant, but my understanding is that, even if I move to another country, I'm still going to live in a secure place anyway, only it will be much smaller and more expensive, both at the same time.

I moved to small town in Canada on the outskirts of Toronto. Literally nobody here locks the door, ever. They don't lock their cars, they regularly forget or leave their keys in their car. They definitely don't begin to have my habit of locking doors when you stop at an intersection.

There's more crime in other parts of Canada of course, and I enforce a bit stricter security in my own house due to my background, but honestly? Much of Canada is almost as nice as stereotype would portray it.

Again, not to say it's wonderful all the time for everybody everywhere in Canada ; it's not and I try to check my definite privilege. But I don't think people here really understand what "high crime levels" really means, on a world wide scale, and I don't think I've really seen a real gated community let alone anything like electric fence, outside of US embassy in Ottawa.

FWIW I lived in Winnipeg and various parts of Toronto, worked in Ottawa and Nova Scotia, visited Saskatchewan and Quebec. There are bad neighbourhoods for sure but it's not pervasive and bad neighbourhoods here are better than brilliant neighbourhood in some places I've lived.

I'd love this; what, in your opinion, are the odds that a 46yo (myself) with a wife and toddler and MiL and cats and dogs getting into Canada?

If I am already remotely working for a SA company? For a company in some other country?

I really don't mind living outside of popular areas if I am remotely employed anyway.

Canada is actively supporting Immigration. Unlike our neighbours, pretty much all mainstream political parties across the spectrum acknowledge our need to bring fresh blood in (though we are getting more and more extremist parties which are seeing more success). But as to chances of any individual case? I'm sorry I haven't a foggiest idea. It's a point system and a long grind and lots of luck. You never know until you try, and my advice like with everything else is don't put all your eggs in one basket - there's new Zealand and Scandinavian countries and million other places I'd be happy to live in.

I suspect small town life is similar in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand: safe (unlocked), possible to fit in, and the best place to bring up kids. My sister moved to a rural area and brought her kids up there and it was a great decision for everyone, versus my city (Christchurch, 400k people, okay but not great for kids IMHO - disclaimer: no kids!). I have no idea what to say if you are seeking city life.

My gut feeling would be to suggest Australia is the most likely best fit. But you should be able to find something that suits your situation and personalities in any of those three countries, if your desires are smart.

You really need to talk with friends and acquaintances that have moved - especially ones that were in your situation but are now decades later down that path.

No. Even in the US, I wouldn't say gated communities are the norm, and at least from what I've seen of what SA houses look like, they're vastly more serious about security than gated communities in the states.

Sure[1], which is why I periodically check what standard of living I can expect if I emigrate to any of the countries I've visited.

I'm frequently shocked that in places like the US it is considered normal to have a 30yr mortgage (I took a 15 year one, and am on track to pay it of in 10 years).

[1] High level of crime, low level of service delivery, shortage of opportunities for my kids, etc. I'm not blind, you know.

Check the historical interest rates of the US/UK vs SA for why that exists.

Not anywhere I can think of in Europe or Australia.

I can understand your point though, if you're used to something it's difficult to change your lifestyle and that's true on both the positives and negatives. Someone used to living in a safe country wouldn't imagine exchanging that safety for a larger house. If you're used to the crime and have not lived anywhere safer then you do not see it as much of a negative. But once you have a large house with a bunch of stuff in it, it's difficult to imagine getting rid of some of the items and live somewhere smaller.

Ignoring the obvious massive disparity you are glossing over here I have perhaps a less antagonistic question.

Do you have to spend a lot on security? Some of these houses look like compounds with wire fences and huge gates etc.

I’m remember the coverage of the Pistorious trial showing all that etc.

In Pretoria I would only consider living in a security estate, Oscar lived in Silver Lakes which is one on the east side of town. All of these estates have walls, electric fences and armed security guards with access controls that require a remote or one time code etc.. Most houses inside of the security estates have very little if any security measures such as alarms etc. because the crime inside is generally petty low. These estates are very similar to US HOA's with architectural standards, many have pools, common ares, golf courses etc.. The levies (monthly fees) are usually between $58 and $174 a month. Taxes seem to run about $100 a month for a $260k house and in Pretoria that can get you a 400 square meter house on a nice sized lot with premium finishes and a pool.

The Cape Town area seems to have higher taxes and what appears to be some community security that seems to even out to the same as what you would pay for a similar house (price-wise) in a security estate in Pretoria. The difference is that it appears that you can have enough coverage with cameras and beams in the parts I've been looking at, though many choose to have the electric fences for good measure and there are some security estates as well.

Because, while crime is high, and power is intermittent, it is not bad enough to make me give up my 700sqm house on a 2000sqm plot in a (somewhat safe) suburb close to everything, to live elsewhere in about a quarter of the space.

Every time I look at emigrating I face a large drop in my standard of living if am in a similar role in any high-paying area in the US or UK.

Entertaining guests, large extended family, having enough space for both a pool table and a ping-pong table indoors, nice to have dedicated study (came in handy during pandemic), bedrooms are very generous so get used for more than sleeping (e.g. MiL's b/room has all her hobbies in it, jigsaw tables, crafts, etc).

People watch TV and kids play games, and they never disturb each other.

Large space is a component of standard of living; when I talk to people who've never lived in a large space, they can't imagine how their life would be improved by a large space.

Asking people "Why do you need a large house?" is like asking people "why do you need an SUV?[1]"

[1] The SUV is, IIRC, the most popular class of car sold in many countries (excluding commercial vehicles). People like nice things. I like nice houses.

700 sqm sound like an endless dusting and cleaning chore to me, unless you can afford to have servants.

I have a gardener come once a week, and a domestic worker once a week. I'm hardly saving money on servants by staying in SA, you racist moron.

So? You think I'm staying in SA just because once every 7 days I pay someone to mow my lawn?

How much money do you think I am saving by staying in SA and paying someone to mow the lawn?

You will not get anything close to that for $100 a week in the US even with an illegal immigrant.

Well then the masses at the bottom of the income gap should start voting for someone other than who they've been voting for, for the last 30 years.

You can't blame the higher-income people for this - they have been trying to change the government by voting for someone else, but the the low-income people you are feeling so sorry for refuse to vote otherwise.

The "civil" society you seek can't happen while the masses are still voting the same corrupt government into power in every single election.

Do you propose revoking their right to vote?

The Democratic Alliance looked like it was going to pick up the votes of disaffected black voters, but instead it seems like its leadership decided to pay more attention to Western culture wars (Helen Zille going on about "wokeness" etc) and to protect its right flank from being eroded by Afrikaner nationalists after the 2019 election, rather than courting the centre.

Cyril Ramaphosa's personal popularity helped the ANC in 2019, but it was also used by the DA as an opportunity to shaft Mmusi Maimane, who could have been a viable potential leader in SA.

Can't blame the voters if the politicians leave them with a dearth of choice.

Source: my parents are from South Africa

1. Transfer the majority of your legally earned savings in rand, on which you have already paid taxes, from your South African bank account to a South African coin exchange, using it to buy Bitcoin, or Dai, or Ethereum, or whatever. Since this is white-market money, KYC should be no problem, right?

2. Transfer your Bitcoin (etc.) to a wallet or wallets you control, maybe with multi-signature authorization, maybe using an Electrum seed phrase, etc. Presumably this is what an exchange is for, right? Buying Bitcoin and then sending it somewhere.

3. Move to New Zealand or the Netherlands or wherever your new job is.

Where does this plan fall down in practice today?

Private property rights are intact in South Africa (for now perhaps, but things are bad enough without the need for exaggeration). Also, monetary (exchange) control regulations are quite loose nowadays, and shouldn’t affect normal people trying to emigrate, but as you say, the exchange rate makes this a moot point.

South Africa is one of the most beautiful countries on the planet. It has the raw ingredients to be a global economic powerhouse. What its government - and ostensibly the people voting for it - are doing to it is so sad to see.

Meanwhile the Netherlands thrive, despite barely even having land - most of what they have, they had to take from the sea. There are countless similar examples - it seems resources and land quality have precious little to do with prosperity.

Colonization is more an expression of prosperity, rather than its cause: to colonize, a country already has to be well developed and with a strong military and navy. Ask yourself: with Africa's resources and size, why didn't it colonize Europe, instead of the other way around?

South Africa was no “very productive economy”. The engine behind the “very productive economy” country was (almost) free labor.

People always fail to take that detail into account..

You should also remember that resources went to whites mostly during apartheid. That means around 1/5th of the population…

Fixing inequality is really hard

Newsflash to you though, there is plenty of cheap labour still floating around in SA.

Yet the productive are leaving in droves, whilst the racist (literally) black ruling class in power continue to steal and drive the country into nothingness, perpetually throwing out excuses like you are as to why it can't work now.

I can argue that Apple and the iPhone as a product range is riding on cheap labour from Asia. And so are many products the rich world depends on. Would you say the US is not really a productive country because of that?

No. Too many other countries suffered worse and bounced back faster.

> When can one stop blaming the apartheid?

It will never happen. While the voters are all tribal in their support, the one thing they mostly agree on is racially-based legislation. In such an environment you do not expect the voters to ever dig themselves out of this.

> Instead of blaming, what mistakes that the post-apartheid governments have committed? Sure, corruption is one. How about competence? Competence and corruption can co-exist, though.

For example?

One issue with apartheid is that it essentially withheld education from the black population. Sure, it had schools for them, but they were nothing like the standard of the schools for white children.

So what's an example of a country with an essentially uneducated population of tens of millions who "bounced back(?) faster"?

(I'm German, in case that matters).

Looking at contemporary Poland, one would hardly believe that the country was a heap of ruins and dead bodies mere three generations ago.

They literally built everything after the war and transformed Poland in a country where no one was jobless or homeless a decade after ww2.

Socialism was a godsend (socially and economically) in after-war Poland and so was getting rid of it 4 decades later and later joining the EU.

Don't lecture me on "socialism being a godsend". I saw it with my own eyes. It was a dirty, suffocating, ossified structure where prosperity was a crime, and so was any freedom.

We had martial law between 81 and 83 which made life difficult, as you can imagine a martial law can do, but no one was starving.

You could have bread and milk in the official grocery stores, as long as you were willing to rise early and stand in queue. By 10 am, already sold out.

Buying meat, IIRC, was already somewhat of a challenge. The authorities tried to "re-educate" people towards canned fish.

But the black markets were huge. Impressively huge. You could buy a lot of stuff there, plus sometimes peddlers went door-to-door selling stuff from their backpacks.

Queues existed, this is also true, but again, those were limited to certain rare periods.

Edit: I have completely forget that whole Eastern Block was not allowed to accept Marshall Plan from political reasons and help from Soviets was not really there.

German socialists were rejecting cooperation with Soviet Communists as early as May 1945.

New authentic German parties were organized in June 1945. The CDU was organized (in the Soviet zone) by merging Catholic and Protestant parties that existed in Weimar Germany.

One of the earliest political controversies was whether the surviving July plotters (“Operation Valkyrie”) or Weimar politicians should lead the German people.

The Allied government preferred the Valkyrie plotters. They were sidelined by the politically experienced Weimar politicians.

The Soviets were holding semi-rigged German elections in September 1945. Austria had fair elections by November 1945.

The current German state (“West Germany”) came into existence in 1949. The occupational and autonomous German government existed hand in hand for six years.

It really is amazing how fast “normal politics” resumed in Germany.

South Korea. Took them a couple decades to get moving but once they did they took off like a rocket.

To rephrase the question: “is democracy an end itself, and not just a means to better government?”

The same sort of intrigue that happens in the Chinese Communist Party ruling circles happens in the ANC (not surprising since both are organised under the same principles), meaning that the leader has unfettered power until the next ANC elective conference. Mbeki (competent but with crazy ideas about AIDS that were his undoing) and Zuma were allowed to run amok. Add cadre deployment to the mix, and you can see why South Africa is such a mess…the democratic constitutional order is badly weakened when the electorally dominant political party is run as a personality cult.

I expected Cyril Ramaphosa to be more aggressive in cleaning out the rot, and to perhaps reform the ANC structurally, but he seems very tentative…

Thus, throughout the 1970s and 1980s they actually massively overbuilt electricity generation infrastructure. In the early 90s, electrification programmes were being rolled out in black townships to soak up the excess capacity. Of course, this excess capacity came with an opportunity cost, as all central planning tends to do.

With the advent of the ANC government the emphasis switched to paying off South Africa’s national debt (which has largely been incurred by the apartheid government fighting proxy wars against the Soviet Union and Cuba).

Finance minister Trevor Manuel and then-deputy president Thabo Mbeki, who pretty much ran South Africa from 1996 to 2008 continued and expanded the early 90s austerity. The economy actually did well during this period and South Africa was widely lauded internationally for its fiscal responsibility, however infrastructure investment didn’t keep up, as you point out, the public transport network (which the apartheid government misguidedly deregulated and handed to the free market in the form of the minibus taxi industry in the late 80s), the road network and other infrastructure started deteriorating and also failed to keep up.

The ANC government attempted to restructure the electricity network in the early 2000s to bring it into line with developments in the rest of the world (creating a market torn generation), but by this time Mbeki’s AIDS denialism had cost him a lot of political capital with the left of his party (actually the trade union movement, COSATU in alliance with his party). The bottom line is that it was politically infeasible to restructure the electricity industry (the current government is trying again under duress). So without government build of new generation, and no private sector investment because of the stalled market reforms, demand eventually outstripped supply by 2007 (remember what I said about economic growth being relatively high in that era). Load shedding arrived in late 2007. It was actually a huge surprise when it started, and as you say, we were totally unprepared. The IT industry scrambled to install generators in offices.

With the Soccer World Cup coming up in 2010, Eskom (the government body with a virtual monopoly on electricity supply and generation) ran its fleet hard, and also commissioned two mega coal power stations. Mbeki was replaced by 2009 with Jacob Zuma: Mbeki’s arrogance and his insane AIDS policies having finally done him in. Zuma, was of course, not a technocrat like Mbeki, but embodied some of the worst traits of a politician.

Load shedding actually faded into the background for much of the early 2010s, but by 2015 or so, load shedding returned, as that lack of maintenance because of an electricity fleet that was being run too hard caught up.

The two mega coal power stations have been beset with issues as well.

Eskom, despite recent efforts to clean it up, languished under a cloud of corruption and incompetence through the 2010s with politically connected incompetents gaining purchase throughout the state. Water woes kicked in by 2014, with large parts of high-altitude Gauteng province without water because the pumps that raised water from dam catchments failed (they were repaired but it was a sign of how badly things were being neglected). There are rumours that hangers on from Zuma’s era are sabotaging Eskom from within…it’s hard to be sure, but regardless, it was left in a sorry state.

South Africa is a constitutional democracy with strong institutions…the fact that it managed to survive the Zuma era without collapsing is a testament to that. However, the ruling ANC is run under the Leninist precepts of Democratic Centralism and thus the president of the ANC has enormous power because of the electoral dominance of the party (you could look to China’s CCP intrigues for an analogue).

Even if Cyril Ramaphosa, the current president, and basically a good egg, manages to push through reforms, it may well be too late. The country could well be in a death spiral.

The line "The two mega coal power stations have been beset with issues as well" even radically undersells just how much of a debacle these two power stations have been. They were supposed to be the 8th/9th biggest coal stations in the world & accurately sized to solve the pending shortages in time, the major contracts went to legitimate companies like Alstom, GE & Hitachi. They were supposed to take approx. 5 years from 2007 and cost a reasonable approx. R30 billion each.

What's actually happened is that 15 years later neither is fully operational and the money spent has crossed 10x the original plans. The parts of the stations that currently do work are hamstrung by massive and debilitating design flaws that regularly cause trips or bigger issues (e.g. a smoke stack collapse last month) and there is no clear end for the construction in site even after all this time & money. And these aren't complex nuclear plants - these are just standard coal power stations. How to build them is quite well understood by now!

It's a combination of sustained and massive corruption (every now and then the current administration finds a few extra billion to recoup from a corrupt contractor), poor original designs that have complicated every subsequent step in the waterfall chart and finally unfortunate incompetence (for instance one of the 6 units at Medupi was entirely blown up after hydrogen wasn't vented before maintenance. The entire generator room must now be replaced with new parts from France at the cost of multiple billions of rands and over a year and a half of additional delay).

Finally, w.r.t. the reforms mention in parent comment's final line - I think they have a chance. South Africa has previously had a radically regulated energy sector. Basically you couldn't generate your own power, period. But due to the pressing political weight of the current situation there have been increasing steps away from the ideological commitment to exclusively state run coal powered grid. Large energy users and businesses can now do paperwork for approval to run their own multi-megawatt stations and basically every big factory, mine, mill etc. is now doing this to varying degrees. The big mining houses especially will spend a lot of money building their own infrastructure now. Between allowing the grid to buy private power (a lot of which is affordably priced renewable energy) and a lot of heavy demand starting to make its own power I think there's a fair chance things will stabilize in the next 2 years. The big question is electoral conferences and the next elections. If EFF wins meaningful electoral power there is a strong chance SA will go the route of Venezuela quicker than people think - and I say that as someone who is very committed to staying here and doesn't subscribe to most of the negative takes people can have about SA.

It's worth noting that under the Apartheid government energy in SA was completely dependant on the state [1]. Then towards the end of Apartheid, due to sanctions - among other things, the government basically had to default on its debt causing the national currency, the Rand, to go into a bit of a tail-spin. To cover their expenses the old government took out a loan from the IMF just before handing over power [2]. These loans often come with commitments to reduce government expenditure, amounting to basically an austerity programme.

I assume that is one of the main reasons that many of the promises of both the old government and the incoming ANC had to be scraped and replaced with essentially what amounted to series of austerity measures [3]. In 2020 the government once again took on a loan from the IMF, again with austerity conditions attached... and here we are, with a vaguely stable currency but a gradually failing economy.

[1] I assume as basically a subsidy for the mining sector.

[2] https://www.imf.org/external/np/fin/tad/extrans1.aspx?member...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_welfare_programmes_in_S...

My understanding is that NZ is the usual gateway for South African emigrants, who use it to get to their final destination (usually Australia).

(Canada serves a similar function for those seeking to move to the US.)

Historically the top destinations have been Australia, UK, US, and New Zealand - in that order [0].

Anecdotally, many of our friends are also moving to The Netherlands, so I suspect that a more recent survey would reflect that.

And within South Africa, there is also large scale "semigration" taking place from folks outside the Western Cape province to inside it (because the aforementioned province is arguably the best run in the country).

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20180202090200/https://businesst...

Sorry, I meant "usual gateway for South African emigrants who can't get into Australia directly". I am aware that Australia is the #1 destination.