by Will Tanner, Tablet, September 29, 2024
Though it has avoided the worst outcomes, South Africa is hardly a multiracial paradise. Instead, it has trended toward chaos and internal disaster; its economy is in shambles, its once-budding space and nuclear programs are long gone. Crime rules in place of law and order. South Africa’s internal issues are manifold but can be distilled down to two categories: economic tyranny stemming from an unyielding top-down emphasis on racial spoils programs in the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) mode, and anarcho-tyranny in which the government is both unable and unwilling to protect the Afrikaner, Anglo, and Indian populations from vicious criminals.
The economic aspect of South Africa’s decline is primarily a result of its postapartheid obsession with extending the country’s cursed racial logic, this time in the name of justice and equity. Though it didn’t see the outright expropriations inflicted upon white farmers in Zimbabwe by Mugabe’s government, it has seen softer forms of expropriation and reparations. For example, as of 2024, more than 24 million South Africans, the vast majority of them Black, received welfare grants from just 7.1 million taxpayers. That 3.38-to-1 grant-to-taxpayer ratio is plainly unsustainable. However, with the leftist ANC in charge, it is part of the system now and seen as an important social justice achievement. South Africa also has an outright reparations program for victims of apartheid, another expensive tax money transfer program.
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Though America is not at South Africa’s disastrous level, it may be trending that way. Blackouts are growing more common as political agendas, such as “clean” energy, are prioritized supplying cheap and reliable electricity. Additionally, as Johannesburg is now uninhabitable for law-abiding people, Americans are fleeing their once-great coastal cities for safer and greener pastures in the Southwest and Southeast. As South African business and political leaders use their B-BBEE policies to skim off the top, America’s DEI-demanded struggle sessions are an opportunity for grift that is as massive as it is frequently abused. As a result of the various forms of indirect bribery and insider profiting, most Americans see their politicians as highly corrupt, an opinion with which many taxpayers in South Africa certainly agree. Meanwhile, much as South Africa’s nuclear and space programs are long gone, ours are mere shadows of their former selves.
Finally, there is the fact that America’s drift away from merit and toward South Africa-style CRT and affirmative action came after segregation had ended, much as South Africa’s Marxist change for the worse came after apartheid had voluntarily ended de jure long after it had ended in fact.
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Eskom is far from the only company to degenerate in the face of South Africa’s race laws. The country’s economy is shrinking while unemployment is crushingly high. South African universities struggle to produce qualified graduates while being known for overt racial discrimination. Corrupt politicians and party-linked, gangsterlike entities use the country’s racial laws to skim profits off the struggling economy. Basic infrastructure like the hospital system has crumbled. Meanwhile, what’s left is being pillaged or frittered away in bribery schemes by some of the most corrupt politicians and civil servants on the planet.
B-BBEE, though an albatross on the neck of South Africa’s economy, isn’t the country’s only pressing issue, however. In April 2023, President Ramaphosa signed the Employment Equity Amendment Act into law requiring “equity,” meaning racial-ratio-based representation of staff members in all companies employing 50 people or more, threatening to bring what remains of private enterprise inside the country’s racial spoils system.
The result of South Africa’s policies, racial and otherwise, is, as the Center for International Development described in “Growth Through Inclusion in South Africa,” that its vast postapartheid promise has been frittered away, and economic stagnation has taken hold, impoverishing everyone, regardless of race. As the South African economy has lost critical capabilities, the disadvantaged suffer the most.
Economic woes are just part of South Africa’s problems. It also suffers under a significant and ongoing crime wave that the state is both unable and unwilling to handle. As of 2023, South Africa was the most crime-ridden country on the African continent, beating out even Somalia for that dubious distinction. Most of its once-sparkling cities are uninhabitable due to crime that the state refuses to stop. The resulting state of lawlessness can rightly be called anarcho-tyranny.
Read full article here:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/united-states-south-africa-racial-justice
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