Posts Tagged ‘south africa’

South Africa, the Future of Chicago

Posted: April 20, 2023 by datechguy in crime, News/opinion
Tags: , ,

Sir Humphrey Appleby: [discussing a candidate for a Bishopric} And he’s also against oppression and persecution in Africa.

Prime Minister Jim Hacker: So are we

Sir Humphrey Appleby: Yes, but he’s against it when practiced by black governments as well as white ones.

Prime Minister Jim Hacker: Oh, you mean he’s a racist.

Yes Prime Minister: The Bishop’s Gambit 1986

A while back Robert Stacy McCain wrote about where the state of South Africa under the ANC was doing wrong

Property rights are the basis of all economic advancement. People will not work to create wealth unless they can be sure that they will own what they have created. The protection of private property is therefore one of the most basic functions of government. If a government begins to threaten the “rich” with expropriation (or confiscatory taxes), this will cause a shortage of capital, as those with wealth will leave the country, and foreign investment will dry up. Within a short time, a relatively rich country can be plunged into poverty, as has happened in Venezuela. The consequences of Ramaphosa’s anti-white policies are predictable: The white minority in South Africa will flee, tourism and foreign investment will decline, and South Africa will descend into poverty and violence.

About 20,000 white South Africans leave the country every year, and white people are now less than 9% of the country’s population. The Ramaphosa government’s idea that it can help black people by seizing the property of whites will yield little benefit to those it claims to “help,” since the value of farmland will decline because whites will no longer be willing to buy farms, when their purchases might be seized from them. And as net out-migration by whites can be expected to increase as a consequence of the government’s anti-white hostility, there would be fewer potential white buyers for farms anyway. Real estate values in South Africa are likely to plummet. But if socialists were capable of understanding the consequences of their policies, they wouldn’t be socialists, would they?

And where it was was heading:

James Madison here describes the origins of political division as a matter of people freely pursuing their own interests. The basic job of government is the protection of property rights, and notice that Madison assumes that “different and unequal faculties” will result in people having “different degrees and kinds of property.” No matter what the government may do, this cannot be avoided in a free society. The problem we see in South Africa is that too many people there (as here) were led to believe otherwise and, nearly three decades after the end of apartheid, the failure of the false promise of “equality” produces an irrational rage among those who feel they have been cheated out of something.

Well its five years later and and here is the report of an expat returned to South Africa after a decade and didn’t like what he saw was not pleasant

Besides no airlines, no postal service and no trains, there is a dwindling electricity supply. They have rolling blackouts, euphemistically called “load shedding” which can last as much as 10 hours per day in Cape Town. Johannesburg is worse. People survive by always keeping their thermos flasks filled with hot water, using small gas camping stoves and using rechargeable lanterns for light and a healthy supply of batteries and candles at all times. Food rots in refrigerators so one needs to purchase small amounts of groceries just for a day. Few people can afford to have a generator, let alone the exorbitant cost of diesel fuel. Without electricity there is no viable economy. Retail stores, restaurants, businesses and factories cannot operate. The employees are idle and cannot do their job. As a result they are unable to earn a livelihood. The lack of electricity is a complex topic. In a nutshell, a history of huge financial losses, mismanagement, sabotage and corruption is evident.

Well at least there is equality…of misery:

There have always been people begging on the streets; mostly blacks. Now however, they are joined by ever-increasing white beggars. I did see an entire family including small blond haired children with crude cardboard signs saying “Please help – God bless you” .

According to some reports, over 50% of South Africans live in poverty on less than $2.00 a day. Some have no access to sanitation, water or electricity.

Where is this heading? Well when Zimbabwe did the same thing you actually had people pining for the days of white rule, but the problem here isn’t race, as Insty pointed out years ago:

It’s not black rule. Botswana next door is well-run. It’s rule by leftists, which always makes everything suck. And they always use race as an excuse for their failures. You can see that in the deep-Blue parts of the United States.

It’s the type of stuff that happens when people ransacking stores in Chicago and the mayor elect is unwilling to condemn it or describe it as “A mass protect against poverty and segregation”

And it’s not just majority black cities in the US heading in this direction, Portland Oregon is going there too.

The once idyllic city has descended into chaos, and all the happy talk from 2020 has led to this. Rather than affirming the rule of law and the norms of civilization, the leaders of Oregon and Portland decided to cede the city to the savages, and the savages accepted the invitation and moved in to build their version of society.

Marxism, whoever and wherever it’s tried, the result is the same

The real question: South Africa under the ANC

Posted: December 11, 2013 by datechguy in culture, News/opinion
Tags: ,

People who say, “I vote for the man, not the party” are therefore fools, blown around by the wind and prone to believe whatever they see on TV, because when you vote for the man, you get the party

RS McCain: Pulling at the other end of the Rope

Now that the Mandela memorial service is over and his funeral service a day away it’s time to look at the state of South Africa since his initial election.

Electorally it’s no surprise to anyone that since 1994 Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress has dominated the electoral landscape.  Mandela own election was practically a foregone conclusion.  He won the election in 1994 with over 62% of the vote and his African national congress won 252 seats in the 400 seat parliament.

It’s fair to say that problems of transitioning out of white minority rule was the primary duty of Mandela and by any standard that was admirably done.  His decision to not seek re-election and give up power that he could have kept was key to ensure democratic rule.

But the nation didn’t just get Mandela in power, it got the ANC in power and while Mandela didn’t run in 1999 the ANC did

In 1999 ANC did even better than in 1994 electing Thabo Mbeki with 66.35% and winning 266 seats in parlament.  In 2005 the trend continued as Mbeki was reelected with 69.69% of the vote and the ANC parliamentary majorly went to 279 seats.

Mbeki resigned in Sept 2008 over a corruption case involving Jacob Zuma who would win the presidency in 2009 for the ANC with 65.9% of the vote and 264 seats figures better than Mandela’s initial election but the lowest level of support for the ANC since then.

So the ANC, the party of Mandela has ruled the Country for 20 years. with solid overwhelming majorities.  In fact the irony is ANC’s  worst electoral showing was the year Mandela ran.   The question is:  What kind of job have they done for South Africa?

Well one simple measure of how a country is doing is the unemployment rate.  Let’s look at the IMF figures:

In 1990 the year that Nelson Mandela was released South Africa’s unemployment rate was at 18.78% doubling the 1980 rate of 9.24%.  By the first year of free elections (1994) it was up to 22.89%.  There was a sudden drop in the rate in 1995 to 16.71% but by 1997 the rate was back over 20% (20.95%) and since h left office in 1999 through 2010 the rate has averaged 25.76%  from a high of 30.41% in (2002) and a low of 22.23% (2007).

The current rate in the 3rd quarter of 2013 according to government stats is 24.7%

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Another excellent measure of a county is life expectancy at the time of Mandela’s election let’s take a look at the trend since 1985

South Africa life expectancy 1985-2010

You would think that the end of incredible repression would increase, not decrease life expectancy.  A lot of this has to do with the AIDS rate:

More than five million people in South Africa are HIV-positive – about 10% of the total population.

Last year more than 260,000 people with Aids died – almost half the figure of all those who died in the country.

and the future is not bright:

At least 28% of South African schoolgirls are HIV positive compared with 4% of boys because “sugar daddies” are exploiting them, Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi has said.

He said 94,000 schoolgirls also fell pregnant in 2011, and 77,000 had abortions at state facilities, The Sowetan newspaper reports.

So under ANC rule South Africa has a quarter of its work force idle.  More than a quarter of schoolgirls HIV positive and  Life expectancy down a full 1/6.

And we haven’t even talked the murder rate at 31.3 per 100,000 (by comparison even with the Cartel violence Mexico’s murder rate is 22 per 100,000)

As the LA times reports

South Africa has some of the world’s highest rates of violent crime, with casualty figures mounting like those in a small war. The country had slowly whittled down its murder rate since 1995, but this year’s marginal increase raised fears that the battle against crime may have stalled.

The Institute for Security Studies, a South African think tank, said the figures were presented in a “vague” manner, making analysis difficult. Only the percentage change was provided, without the raw figures.

In fairness the murder rate the year Mandela was elected it was 64.9 higher than Detroit.  Now they are doing better than Detroit.  Let’s look at where South Africa’s killings are taking place

Residents in low-income areas, the analysis shows, are far more likely to be murdered than their middle and high-income counterparts. Half of South Africa’s murders occur in only 13% or 143 out of 1 127 of police precincts.

A vast majority of the average of 43 murders that take place daily do not make the news. They happen in areas where crime and violence are part of the daily despair of residents who already feel marginalised and forgotten by media and politicians.

Remember the person writing this article is a person trying to downplay the violence in South Africa.

As for Rape:

Interpol says South Africa is the world’s rape capital and less than 1% of rape cases are reported to police. According to a reliable website that compiles rape statistics this has had a detrimental effect on successfully pursuing rape cases in the country.

How bad is it? This bad::

South Africa’s parliament issued a reprimand to police Monday after media outlets reported that police stations across the country were running out of rape kits

Mind you all of this is after two decades of rule by the African National Congress duly elected and regularly re-elected by the free people of South Africa.

Without question the removal of the evil Apartheid laws was a positive good and franchise being extended to all citizens is simple justice.  A People must have the right to govern themselves and a government that doesn’t reflect the consent of the governed is unjust.

What is not axiomatic is that a popularly elected government will govern well.

The people have freely chosen to elect The African National Congress for 20 years by landslide majorities.  That party has failed to stem unemployment,   has seen life expectancy drop by nearly a decade during their rule and been a haven for murder and rape.

Yesterday spectacle to the world showing how South Africans  has progressed under the management of the leftist African National congress.  It’s been a great time for the country “except maybe for the people who got killed or raped.”

I’m sure some will think this a rather hard critique, some might even throw an epithet at me for it (remember there are five a’s in raaaaacist).  To those critics of all races, creeds and political beliefs I ask this question:

Would any one of you choose to move to such a country, raise your children in such a country or encourage your sons and daughters to do so?

Update: While the media is busy discussing Angelo-American-Danish relations almost nobody in media seemed to notice or bother covering the booing of the President of South Africa

Hmm @bbcamerica says South Africans may use POSA’s speech to express anger over corruption etc yet they regularly vote ANC 60% #tcot #p2

— Peter Ingemi (@DaTechGuyblog) December 10, 2013

But apparently the South African president did

Ah, freedom MT @BBCAndrewH: Pres Zuma’s advisor tells me Mandela stadium booing was “humiliating” & those responsible will be “dealt with”

— Jeff Emanuel (@jeffemanuel) December 11, 2013

Perhaps the booing might have something to do with this:

Speaker at #mandela funeral talked of the link between SA & #cuba in development etc. That explains much (24.7% unemployment) #tcot #p2

— Peter Ingemi (@DaTechGuyblog) December 10, 2013

The question is: Will they make the ANC pay at the ballot box?