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I don't think South Africa is a perfect example. I can't tell whether your South Africa % is too high or too low, depending on whether you are including the Coloured population, which is of mixed ancestry.
In any case, my impression is that South Africa has been in a pretty dramatic decline, that I don't think is due to the mere percentage ancestry. Zuma's presidency was, as far as I understand, pretty terrible and corrupt, and the same party remains in power. People leave the country. Affirmative action is in place for employment.
At this point, they're having routine power outages, when that wasn't a thing in the past.
And, of course, they have the highest unemployment rate in the world.
Not exactly a fair measure.
Do you think Germans would have elected for themselves someone as grotesquely corrupt and dim as Zuma ?
We know from America that highly black places routinely elect from their own ranks very bad leaders.
I don't believe you can separate the two easily.
Argentina is 90% white and has elected a long series of terrible political leaders who took it from being one of the wealthiest countries in the world to being poorer than Mexico through mismanagement. Granted very few of those whites are German, but white/Chinese San Francisco went into a tailspin by electing terrible leaders who wrecked the place through mismanagement.
Demographics will not save you.
Or perhaps GDP is not a very good measure of civilizational worth. Though Argentina is acknowledged to be the exception.
What about literally every other metric, from murder rates to life expectancy to, I dunno, the condition of public parks? I suspect South Africa will be far behind Argentina.
What about Ukraine, which had a population with a comfortable average IQ and a smart, sizeable Jewish minority, see Zelensky, but which was laughably poor before the war? Ukraine has lower GDP per capita and lower median income than South Africa (pre-war).
Crime, general pleasantness etc are all good retorts of course; Ukraine was arguably a nicer place to live pre-war, although my guess is most white South Africans wouldn’t make the move in 2019 even if offered (generally they hold out for Australia, New Zealand, Canada, sometimes Britain, or bust).
The obvious answer seems to be that they don't want to move to a country where they don't speak the language. Afrikaans is a hybrid of 18th century English and Dutch, so obviously an English (or Dutch) speaking country is preferable to an Eastern-European country.
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