I was there at the time of the new start and great optimism in '95. But nothing extraordinary happened.
Just as in every case of post colonialism I can think of , the foreign snouts in the trough were just augmented by indigenous ones. SFA positive for the folks on the ground.
Much as I dislike Trump and Musk, Ramaphosa is a crook (though mildly less so than Zuma, one might argue) and Zimbabwe is a forewarning of what happens when crooks take over a thriving African economy.
I had to smile - two world crooks sitting together, one orange and the other black, neither with any remorse - the black one says: ‘If I had an airplane, I would give it to you’ to which the orange one says ‘And if you offered me an airplane, I would take it…’
There is no shame these days.
Yes, the brazenness from both of them was shocking… At least in the good old days bribes were made discretely.
Or perhaps I’m being too generous, and they were both too stupid to realise that they aren’t supposed to say that bit out loud.
It doesn’t matter.
Good article. We lived not far from Fourways and the Alexandra township. I was warned to never. just never, drive into or through Alexandra.
One of the main reasons why I left SA was the rising local hijacking and murder rate, not just in the surrounding countryside, but in the town and even on my university’s campus. However, none of the local farm murders, nor indeed any of the others were of Afrikaners, instead the farmer families were anglophones of British descent. These murders were brutal, but the motivation was economic deprivation, not racial vengeance.
Nevertheless, if you’re dead, your killer’s motivation isn’t that important