South Africa has become a gangster state: Model for the upcoming world? By Brian Pottinger.
During his 1999-2008 form, [the former South African president Thabo Mbeki] … introduced a state-sanctioned system of race-based extortion of wealth and opportunity under the guise of black empowerment, ushered in a new era of political cronyism, and gave rise to a new and truly avaricious economic elite, a multi-tentacled screen of parasites through which little national wealth percolates to the masses.
In The Mbeki Legacy, I labelled Mbeki a de-moderniser, for the simple reason that through ideological misdirection, he severely weakened the country’s institutional capacity, something the entirely malignant former president Jacob Zuma later took full advantage of to create his gangster state. …
The state is shriveling due to incompetence and corruption. Private organizations are rising to take its place:
President Ramaphosa, once hailed as the modernising saviour of the country after the depredations of his predecessor, has not turned the country away from its trajectory towards a failed state. Institutional collapse is obvious in many state and para-state institutions and physical infrastructure is dire. Those citizens who can afford to have turned to private suppliers of health care, security and education. Going off-grid is now a staple of dinner conversation. …
The feuding ANC and its bankrupt state apparatus have lost real influence in the lives of ordinary citizens: so much so that an organisation called Afriforum, initially an Afrikaner civil rights group but now enjoying wide support across all race groups because of its feisty legal defence of wronged citizens, has stated its intention to make communities “state-proof”, ending their reliance on state-provided services.
All of this is a direct consequence of Ramaphosa’s refusal to reverse the core drivers of collapse and the enablers of corruption: race-based economic empowerment policies, inappropriate state appointments, expensive social welfare programmes, land seizures and a culture of impunity at all levels of state and elected office. …
Ultimately, it may not matter much who governs South Africa. The existential threat faced by the country is the terrifying loss of skills, much of it driven out by the ANC’s affirmative action policies. Collapsed state training and educational institutions cannot introduce black candidates at sufficient a rate. There is the rub. …
Without a competent state the nation will devolve into communal zones. The rich will live well. The poor will endure. The gaps will grow. This cantonising of the country is already happening and it is still largely around apartheid-era geographical divisions. The threat is therefore not popular uprising but decay: social, economic, political and cultural, just like the old days.
South Africa is ruled by a racist communist Party, and is rapidly devolving back to the pre-modern era. South Africa cannot sustain a society that exhibits modernity and upholds the enlightenment and democracy.
The left refuse to deal with race or IQ honestly. They refuse to see what is happening in South Africa. They don’t want to know.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
