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Can one blame apartheid governments for today's problems? When can one stop blaming the apartheid? Instead of blaming, what mistakes that the post-apartheid gov

Can one blame apartheid governments for today's problems? When can one stop blaming the apartheid? 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.

lelanthran 4y ago
> 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.
- antonvs 4y ago
  > 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"?
  - TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
    Germany leveled to the ground in 1945, occupied up to 1955
    - chess_buster 4y ago
      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).
      - inglor_cz 4y ago
        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.
        epolanski 4y 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.
        superchroma 4y ago
        maybe godsend is too strong a term for a repressive, corrupt military occupation that only ended in 1992.
        epolanski 4y ago
        We have never had a soviet military occupation. You're thinking about Hungary and Czech Republic.
        inglor_cz 4y ago
        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.
        epolanski 4y ago
        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.
    - xnyan 4y ago
      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.
      - TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
        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.
        int_19h 4y ago
        The Eastern Bloc had https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comecon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comecon.
        TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
        That's more-less like current EU but completely worthless
      - jdkee 4y ago
        Economic aid to Africa since 1960 exceeds the Marshall Plan by an order of magnitude.
      - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
        100% sure Germany would have recovered without any aid, maybe it would take 10 years longer.
    - pyuser583 4y ago
      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.
    - antonvs 4y ago
      Germany was not uneducated.
  - goatlover 4y ago
    28 years is a generation ago. What's been happening with the education since then?
  - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
    >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.
  - pannSun 4y ago
    What was the school quality in other African countries, without apartheid?
    - lazide 4y ago
      Have any of them ‘bounced back’?
      - pannSun 4y ago
        "Back" to what? Their level of development before the age of colonization?
        lazide 4y ago
        You’d have to ask the poster I was replying to. It’s a good question though!
  - pyuser583 4y ago
    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?”
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Gareth321 4y ago
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 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.
- pannSun 4y ago
  > 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.
  - xyzzy123 4y ago
    I agree with your general point but feel that the Netherlands are a poor example to use given their history of colonisation in Africa.
    - pannSun 4y ago
      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?
buyx 4y ago
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…
lern_too_spel 4y ago
I don't understand where this question is coming from. GP blamed today's problems on ANC.
rsj_hn 4y ago
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.

lelanthran 4y ago

> 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.

antonvs 4y ago
> 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"?
- TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
  Germany leveled to the ground in 1945, occupied up to 1955
  - chess_buster 4y ago
    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).
    - inglor_cz 4y ago
      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.
      - epolanski 4y 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.
        superchroma 4y ago
        maybe godsend is too strong a term for a repressive, corrupt military occupation that only ended in 1992.
        epolanski 4y ago
        We have never had a soviet military occupation. You're thinking about Hungary and Czech Republic.
        inglor_cz 4y ago
        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.
        epolanski 4y ago
        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.
  - xnyan 4y ago
    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.
    - TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
      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.
      - int_19h 4y ago
        The Eastern Bloc had https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comecon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comecon.
        TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
        That's more-less like current EU but completely worthless
    - jdkee 4y ago
      Economic aid to Africa since 1960 exceeds the Marshall Plan by an order of magnitude.
    - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
      100% sure Germany would have recovered without any aid, maybe it would take 10 years longer.
  - pyuser583 4y ago
    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.
  - antonvs 4y ago
    Germany was not uneducated.
- goatlover 4y ago
  28 years is a generation ago. What's been happening with the education since then?
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  >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.
- pannSun 4y ago
  What was the school quality in other African countries, without apartheid?
  - lazide 4y ago
    Have any of them ‘bounced back’?
    - pannSun 4y ago
      "Back" to what? Their level of development before the age of colonization?
      - lazide 4y ago
        You’d have to ask the poster I was replying to. It’s a good question though!
- pyuser583 4y ago
  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?”

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Gareth321 4y ago

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 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.

pannSun 4y ago
> 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.
- xyzzy123 4y ago
  I agree with your general point but feel that the Netherlands are a poor example to use given their history of colonisation in Africa.
  - pannSun 4y ago
    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?

buyx 4y ago

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…

lern_too_spel 4y ago

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

rsj_hn 4y ago

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.