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Notes -
Have we had a discussion on South Africa yet?
Recently, Andre de Ruyter, the now-ex CEO of the state owned power provider ESKOM, did an interview that basically said the corruption and everything was so bad that he and ESKOM cannot do their jobs properly. He himself was a target of assassination (cyanide pill in his coffee or something?), and after the interview has been removed from his post (he put in his resignation before the interview). He has since left the country.
There are many reports that the grid can totally collapse soon, despite the "load shedding" that they have been doing. Apparently this may lead to civil war?
Unemployment is apparently 35%, clean water access and supply is apparently unstable. Crime is apparently extremely high. If you go on /r/southAfrica, there are frequent discussions of home invasion and other crimes (70 carjackings a day, 2500 home invasions a day...). One post I saw last week was a question asking "Dogs been poisoned, both dead. Typically how many days before robbery hit?"
See this recent thread for more issues: https://twitter.com/k9_reaper/status/1630436052723720193
Some blame this all on the ruling ANC party, on their policies like BBBEE (from a few years ago: https://www.revolver.news/2021/07/south-africa-riots-looting-critical-race-theory/).
In general, SA's situation is not looking good...
...what the hell do you think it's going to happen once economic conditions worsen even more ? Do you think there's going to be less anarchy and more security when people are closer to starvation ?
Things have been mostly decaying since the Apartheid gov't fell. Government is now saying it has "no duty" to ensure reliable power.
Afrikaners mostly have a plan that involves evacuating to Cape Province, and declaring independence there together with the locals. There's already 60% support. (in Cape, for Cape independence)
It's the only part of SA that kind of works because it's only 20% black, has the most whites iirc and coloreds in SA are less bad at governance than blacks.
As the saying goes, "there is a great deal of ruin in a nation". They can keep getting worse and worse for a very long time without anything you'd call "collapse".
It's been 30 years.
The police already doesn't work. The army's mostly HIV positive.
There's more armed private security than there is police and army taken together.
Define collapse. Seat of government taken over by mobs ?
The Soviet Union took longer than that.
Civil war. Effective partition with multiple competing governments owing no fealty to the official one. Inability of the government to collect sufficient taxes to support itself.
Actually it was 25 years. The decline of the Soviet Union started with Brezhnev - Khruschev had the revolutionary idea for communist that economic of a country and some form of free enterprise and free culture are important.
If his reforms were allowed to continue who knows how much different the world would have been today
Big K had indeed many revolutionary ideas, all of them stupid.
Starting with denouncing his precedessor who was for thirty year worshipped as living god, undermining whole party and state legitimacy just to win some stupid personal power struggle.
The most hardcore tankies are 100% right about him.
Chinese did it better, they kept big M in the mausoleum, kept his statues and portraits everywhere while doing 180 degrees turn from his policy.
Otherwise, none of his reform had anything with "free enterprise" and "free culture."
Not hunt for abstract art, not renewal of religious persecution, not abolition of machine tractor stations, not destruction of workers cooperatives, not destruction of peasant's private plots, not the maximally demented corn idea.
Set aside this thing, equivalent of waving BB gun at heavily armed and armored cops and saying "Boo, pigs!"
May he be reborn thousand of thousands times as pig on factory farm.
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