I agree. Successive governments have had 28 years to build and upgrade power infrastructure. Negligence and corruption have prevented that. Electricity is just one symptom of a much greater problem in SA. Apartheid was clearly immoral, but they handed over the keys to a very productive economy, on land with some of the best resources in the world, on which they had built excellent infrastructure. Since 1994, every single development metric has continued to decline. Everything from literacy to health outcomes to infrastructure. In September, the government passed a Zimbabwe-style bill which will allow it to seize land on the basis of race (https://allafrica.com/view/group/main/main/id/00083533.html). Within a matter of years we will begin seeing famine; in a nation with some of the best and most abundant farmland in the world.

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.

> Within a matter of years we will begin seeing famine; in a nation with some of the best and most abundant farmland in the world.

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.

I agree with your general point but feel that the Netherlands are a poor example to use given their history of colonisation in Africa.

The Netherlands themselves were under military pressure by neighboring countries, Spain, and Britain, and was occupied and starved by Germany in WW2, and had many of their dikes broken.

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?

Apartheid South Africa's economy was already experiencing troubles as far back as the 1970s and 1980s. All of that happened despite a majority of the population being marginalized and mainly used as a cheap source of labour.

> Apartheid was clearly immoral, but they handed over the keys to a very productive economy, on land with some of the best resources in the world, on which they had built excellent infrastructure.

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

Have living standards (literacy, health, etc) improved for the nonwhite population in the past 28 years?

This is such an easy argument to throw around. Almost no way to disprove it or address it, and basically sweeps responsibility away from current failings.

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.

It is a complicated set of circumstances to assess. But SA most certainly was a productive economy, even if you account for the abundance of labour.

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?

Unlike the third world countries, the US is in unique situation: the whole world can exchange their real assets(commodities, finished products, etc) for the US dollar. This luxury is not available to any Asian/African country. That's why the USD is called the world reserve currency.

> Can one blame apartheid governments for today's problems?

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.

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

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"?

Germany leveled to the ground in 1945, occupied up to 1955

Germany made the allies to believe much more factories and infrastructure were destroyed than actually were. Additionally Germany has been shortly before that the scientific center of the world regarding Physics, Chemestry, Engineering… So the land of the thinkers and poets ("Dichter und Denker") obviously had a different starting point, no?

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

In that case, try Poland. It was destroyed very thoroughly and methodically, with all the famous German attention to detail, so to say. And the subsequent occupation by the Soviets didn't help either.

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

> Soviets didn't help either

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.

maybe godsend is too strong a term for a repressive, corrupt military occupation that only ended in 1992.

We have never had a soviet military occupation. You're thinking about Hungary and Czech Republic.

I grew up next to the Polish border. In the 80s, the grocery stores were literally empty and everything had to be bought on the black market. In a country that is fairly agriculturally productive no less.

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.

Man I'm Polish, grocery stores have never been empty.

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.

I visited places like Cieszyn, Katowice and Sosnowiec when I was a kid, and anything beyond the most basic things had to be bought on the black market.

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.

Yes, it's true. Meat has always been highly trafficked on the black market.

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

What was not bombed down, was looted by invading armies, especially in eastern front.

With the help of huge amounts of cash and other support from the United States. This is also why Japan and South Korea recovered so quickly. South Africa did not get a Marshall Plan.

That has something to do with fact that South Africa was not bombed into oblivion, but had actually working economy on the end of the apartheid. Additionally there might be no Marshall Plan for African countries, but there is constant financial aid to African countries since end of WW2.

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.

The Eastern Bloc had https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comecon.

That's more-less like current EU but completely worthless

Economic aid to Africa since 1960 exceeds the Marshall Plan by an order of magnitude.

100% sure Germany would have recovered without any aid, maybe it would take 10 years longer.

German democracy began almost as soon as the war ended … in some cases a bit earlier.

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.

Germany was not uneducated.

28 years is a generation ago. What's been happening with the education since then?

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

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

What was the school quality in other African countries, without apartheid?

Have any of them ‘bounced back’?

"Back" to what? Their level of development before the age of colonization?

You’d have to ask the poster I was replying to. It’s a good question though!

I feel really conflicted about this. If enfranchising a large group of people destroys the quality of government … is it a good idea?

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

The ANC is structurally broken: that’s the bottom line.

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…

I don't understand where this question is coming from. GP blamed today's problems on ANC.

Unfortunately you see this pattern often after a regime change, that the group that is able to seize power -- in this case, the ANC -- is not necessarily competent enough to govern. These are different skillsets. Message discipline, mobilization, guerrilla tactics, etc, don't transfer over to keeping the lights on. You have similar issues with present-day Taliban in Afghanistan.