It feels like the root-cause of the decay and ruin is, by the end of the writing, a total lack of qualifying competence in leadership or government. the bungling amentia is so agonizingly glaring as to lead one to question if it, as the casualties pursuant to the fall of the raj in india or the bengal famine, were an intentional petulance...an act of thoughtless spite after having been made to atone for an atrocity and capitulate to the will of a people that had for so long been subservient to you.
the ruling party embraces fragments of political systems they observe, as a child might mimic their favourite tv cartoon character, but at the end of the day the jangling discord of kleptocratic nihilism drowns out whatever character features the government hopes to project abroad.
I think some of it has to do with the idea that skills that reward "revolutionaries" are not analogous to skills needed to run the state after they assume control. Those that are able to consolidate power have an advantage in capturing power in a vacuum, but all that means is that they have the political skills to know how to consolidate power, it has no bearing on their ability to run the a nation. The guy who catches the golden goose is just good at catching geese, it doesn't say anything about his ability to care for it afterwards. An issue is that elections filter based on the ability of the former and not the later.
It is sort of similar in how many nation building projects of the west have failed in recent times, because the people put into positions of power, weren't in power before for a reason which is usually tied to their incompetence.
It's tempting to suggest electing people based on their past experiences of successfully administering something, except all the real world examples I can think of are former CEOs getting elected to run the government "like a business" and it just leads to shortsighted privatization (and eventual degradation) of public services.
That is true, though I feel like the issue has overlap in the emergence of public relations and the paradigm shift in advertising (from qualitative appeals to emotional appeals) over the 20th century. Basically it is a lot harder to accurately judge if someone can do something, but in modern politics that doesn't matter because emotional appeals are much more successful at capturing an audience. So the business ceo is just an archetype that appeals to an idea, and doesn't have much of a qualitative value outside of that. An example would be Carly Fiorina who ran in 2016 as the candidate with business acumen from her time as CEO with HP, when in reality her tenure at HP painted a different story.
When news broke that Carly Florina was stepping down, HP's stock gained 3 billion dollars in response.
Also up where I live there's still anger over the layoffs. For a lot of people HP was something more than a job, but more like the hub of their entire community.
This is the reason why a lot of countries will elect the mayor or governor of some part of the country. Having successfully administered a smaller part of the country is probably the best predictor we have for being able to administer a larger part.
Private sector experience can sometimes translate well, I've seen it in my country in a few places.
In this case most of the voting population is not educated enough to vote otherwise. There is also strong community/family pressue to continue voting for the ANC - the party that freed the country from apartheid. For many people it would be very difficult to openly vote for another political party.
This is notwithstanding the shenanigans that occur at election time. Likely not outright election rigging but there is certainly a lot of pressure and threats of violence on voting day (and also free t-shirts and mattresses).
Without the current "leading up to the day" pressures would it be fair to say the populist vote is strong in this direction enough to carry the next forseeable election?
I just wonder as I've known 2 people from SA and I neither seemed a fan of the ANC and the rep it was getting for the country internationally. Both of different race backgrounds although I doubt it mattered.
The ANC is something of a Labour-based party - so it has a blue-collar bent to it and gets the endorsements of many unions. I'll assume the 2 people you met were not blue-collar, so chances are they are not ANC supporters.
There really is not single politically party that enough support to get more votes than the ANC, whose share of the vote has been dropping steadily by 3-5% every 4-year election cycle.
Yes, although the ANC is losing voting share every election - especially in the major urban areas. Part of those votes go to the either the DA or more recently the EFF.
The DA is historically a white party but mostly has black leadership now. It's _mostly_ unaffiliated with the National Party (ruling party during Apartheid) but still has the stigma among most of the population as being the "white party".
The EFF on the other hand is the real populist winner lately. They're extremely left leaning (Marxist-Lenin inspired) and want to nationalise most businesses (including mining) and get rid of all white capital ownership. I wouldn't be surprised if they continue to gain more power - they're purpose built for the current SA population.
But also 1 thing to keep in mind is that the people you've met are probably not representative of the vast majority of the country.
> The DA is historically a white party but mostly has black leadership now. It's _mostly_ unaffiliated with the National Party (ruling party during Apartheid) but still has the stigma among most of the population as being the "white party".
The DA is not doing itself any favours though, with Zilles gaffes and how often it sheds black leaders - how many have been ejected now after factional battles? 3 in 6-ish years?
> But also 1 thing to keep in mind is that the people you've met are probably not representative of the vast majority of the country.
Oh I would assume not, nor would they pretend to have been. That's why I was curious was it a coincidence or a product of them being in academia. (Bit of both I suspect)
The DA has been shedding its black leadership for years now though, leaving the top echelons of the party much more white than black. Most of its black leadership have left for the same reason: That the mostly-white old guard, exemplified by Helen Zille, are resistant to adopting slightly more left-wing policies that would appear to the majority of the population, are too blind on the needs of social redress, and run the party as a clique rather than a meritocracy.
As long as that remains the DA will be a special interest party that won’t get enough votes to be able to govern the country.
It’s a pity, because we really need sane alternatives to the ANC with broad appeal.
As for the EFF, while they would in theory be well-placed to take advantage of this their growth rate has been much smaller than you’d expect. They’ve made many missteps that have plateaued their level of popularity. That might change in future of course.
Unfortunately, due to the level of education and overall intelligence of the majority of the voting people here, they will believe what they are told. And they can easily be fooled to think that their "vote" will be "checked" to make sure it's for the right party.
countries that didn't have a functioning bureaucracy before becoming democracies, struggle to develop one after they become democracies. That's because democracy is very prone to corruption on a massive scale , in ways in which authoritarian regimes are not (they are oligarchic).
I'll have to disagree, everywhere I look it seems that authoritarian regimes foster corruption way more than democracies. They tend to weaken institutions, specially those that would provide checks against corruption, in order to consolidate power. Developing a functioning burocracy free of corruption from scratch is very difficult under a democracy, but it is even harder under an authoritarian regime.
IF they are weakening institutions, then those institutions were already developed, hence it does not apply. The advent of authoritarianism does corrupt a functioning state. But statebuilding with democracy has been tried countless times, especially in ex-colonial countries and i don't know many cases where it worked.
Authoritarian regimes are incredibly prone to corruption, you just have less opportunity to complain about it in them, than you do in a democracy (even in an ailing democracy).
the ruling party embraces fragments of political systems they observe, as a child might mimic their favourite tv cartoon character, but at the end of the day the jangling discord of kleptocratic nihilism drowns out whatever character features the government hopes to project abroad.