Monday, 12 November 2007

Hurrah for the end of Apartheid!

Things have got so much better for the down-trodden African!

My latest blogpost: Hurrah for the end of Apartheid!Tweet this! Posted by Mark Wadsworth at 23:08

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5 comments:

Scott Freeman said...

As evil as apartheid was, there's something to be said for the old government. Or is that just a rewording of the old Nazi cliche?

When you consider how much less the dollar is worth today than a decade ago, these figures are all the worse...

12 November 2007 at 23:19
Mark Wadsworth said...

SC, I have no idea, ask The Remittance Man, I just thought it was a good statistic; number living in absolute poverty doubled, murders running at 20,000 a year. Sounds like shit to me.

12 November 2007 at 23:22
Anonymous said...

Before apartheid fell, my view was simple.

Apartheid was a horrible way to run a country. But it was perfectly possible that whatever replaced it would be even worse.

Because the Boers turned out not to be tough guys, but a bunch of spineless braggarts, and because Mandela was far superior to the run-of-the-mill African "leader", the transition went better than I'd expected. But I don't yet see that my basic proposition was wrong.

12 November 2007 at 23:36
Mark Wadsworth said...

D, given that people are fleeing Robert Mugabe's hellhole to get to SA, it is always possible for something to be worse!

12 November 2007 at 23:47
The Remittance Man said...

Part of the problem could be the statistics themselves. Provided they stayed "on the reservation", the old government was pretty slap happy when it came to actually counting the HDSA population. Add to this the fact many blacks avoided official censii and so on (for some eminently sensible reasons). This malaise extended into the early years of the new government. What you could be seeing is simply better gathering of statistics.

We've also got a government that's made employing people way more expensive. So instead of seeing employment grow with econmic growth you get technological growth instead. Which immediately pushes the poorly educated even further out of the way when it comes to finding a job.

For that we can thank the ANC's alliance with COSATU which despite representing only a small part of the workforce, weilds way too much power over legislation.

13 November 2007 at 09:42

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