Monday, February 13, 2017

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: THE UNEASY FUTURE OF SOUTH AFRICA MADE MORE UNEASY BY ITS PRESIDENT'S RECENT STATEMENT


COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN ZERO HEDGE


“South Africa's President Vows To Redistribute White-Owned Land And Businesses”

This has been expected and feared by many since the end of the old South Africa.

South Africa has been economically successful enough to be included in the BRICS group of promising future economies.

Clearly, any change of this nature will throw all that overboard.

There is a fundamental - perhaps insoluble? - problem in South Africa.

The inequality, which is a normal part of all economies, is made strikingly visible by the ethnic identities of the two extremes there.

I don't know that one can imagine a long-term solution to such a situation: a few million relatively prosperous to extremely wealthy white people living with tens of millions of poor blacks plus the demands and pressures that come with democratic government.

I know some prosperous whites left, but it is not so easy. Many of the wealth-generating assets - great farming estates to rich mineral deposits - are not portable, and there is no one really in such an economy to sell them to so that you can leave.

Quite a terrible situation to find yourself stuck in.

And, of course, South Africa is also one of the world's most violent advanced places, with horrific murder and rape rates.

The wealthy still live in heavily armed enclaves, just as they did under the previous regime.