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Strategies & Market Trends : Africa and its Issues- Why Have We Ignored Africa? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (17)	4/13/2003 5:58:17 PM
From: Dale Baker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1267

"Stabilizing SA" is a huge concept to grapple with. Like everything in that vast, diverse mosaic, it all depends on your perspective. Under apartheid, SA was three states - the Afrikaner-dominated police state with state-controlled economic institutions; a small (but VERY prosperous) private sector world where most English-speaking whites and European emigres lived; and the SA for everyone else under apartheid, which was marginal if you were Coloured or Indian and probably somewhere between awful and horrific if you were black. Today, the Afrikaner security state is gone and rightly so; most who benefited from it have a shaky grip on the future but they don't have passports to go anywhere else. Que sera, sera. The private sector English-speakers are leaving in droves. These are prosperous, well-educated folks who see no stability or prosperity ahead for their children. Some believed that the post-apartheid world would be OK and derided those who left early for taking "the chicken run". Many of those are now applying for their Australian and New Zealand visas to get out. A certain number will stay and run the incredible private sector machine in SA that dwarfs anything else in Africa by a long shot. The black community will end up distributed all along the spectrum above - a few at the political top, a larger number in the successful private sector, many more in a modest new black middle class and the rest condemned to the same poverty they knew before. Prosperous societies depend on a number of things, chief among them faith in their institutions. The remnants of the prosperous white community don't trust the brief and tumultuous record of black rule (which is understandably poor since apartheid never trained anybody else to take over). Blacks don't know what to make of it yet but their lives have always been day to day; judging "success" is another relative concept. I always thought it would take 20 years of majority rule to see if SA can make it. Nine years into it the track record could be worse. But SA has not emerged as a regional leader with great stature the way it could have. Whether it does in the future depends on whoever follows Mbeki in power. If SA could sort out their political and security problems (i.e. unchecked crime) I would buy a retirement place there in a flash. But I have no intention of doing so for now and maybe not ever. Overall I expect the international community to put Africa ever lower down their list of priorities. Why? Because Africans don't give them a reason to do anything else. It's not PC to say so but hey, it's a cold, cruel world out there. Successful nations learn to live with it. The rest don't.