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A South Africa update and it's not pretty
Twenty-six years ago, "South Africans engaged in a peaceful revolution. As late as the 1980s commentators predicted that any transition from white minority domination and black majority rule would precipitate a bloody civil war. Instead, in 1994 South Africans replaced president F. W. de Klerk with Nelson Mandela in a free and fair election that astonished the world." Thus, ". . . South Africans of all races voted in the country's first democratic elections, choosing Mandela as their first black president. The inhumane apartheid regime seemed to be miraculously ending peacefully, though much work remained to improve the lives of all South Africans." By the "late 1980s, however, South Africa’s economy was in a deep recession and large segments of the country were becoming ungovernable." Former president Jacob Zuma (2009-18) "brought the country a reputation for corruption and ineptitude." In fact, in 2018, the World Bank ranked South Africa as the most corrupt country in the world. In 2018, Hammond and Tupy "in reviewing South Africa's flirtation with the idea of changing its constitution to let the state expropriate farmland without compensation, wrote that South Africa need only look north to Zimbabwe to see the disastrous consequences of this kind of policy." Zimbabwe's former dictator Robert Mugabe gave "the green light to his paramilitary supporters to invade commercial farms, seize some 23 million acres of land and the confiscated farms were resettled with small scale agriculturalists. Many of the new would-be-farmers had no real knowledge of commercial agriculture and many soon returned to subsistence farming. The actual commercial farmers left for other African countries and the result was devastating food shortages in a nation once dubbed the 'bread basket of Africa.'" Posted by: Besoeker 2020-08-01 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=578520 |