We do our fair share of bitching and moaning about the state of our country and our leadership, although there’s a special sting in the tail when you read a piece from an overseas site which takes aim and pops off a few rounds in our direction.

This time it’s the Financial Times with their article titled ‘South Africa’s rainbow starts to fade’, using the Rhodes Must Fall campaign as a starting point to illustrate the thread by which the Rainbow Nation idea hangs. They then move onto this year and the Zuma Must Fall marches which is where we’ll take up from:

Race poisons many aspects of daily life. White people, for example, are not alone in thinking President Jacob Zuma’s African National Congress, plagued by allegations of corruption and incompetence, is part of the problem. Yet protests organised around the slogan “Zuma Must Fall”, attended mainly by white people, misfired. Some saw them as an excuse to tell black people: “We told you so. You can never run a country properly.”

South Africa’s yawning wealth gap cannot explain all this pent-up anger — but it explains a lot. The economic gulf that the apartheid system was designed to perpetuate remains as wide as ever. The unemployment rate of black South Africans, who make up four-fifths of the population, is 29 per cent, against 6 per cent for white people. In 2013, 87 per cent of whites enjoyed middle to upper-income status, according to Goldman Sachs, while 85 per cent of black people were lower income…

Now the battered economy will do well to avoid recession. The central bank puts potential growth at a measly 1.5 per cent, implying almost nothing to share around a population growing at 1.3 per cent a year. In the long term, the only solution is a radical overhaul of an education system that has utterly failed the black majority. Unless South Africa can train a skilled workforce capable of competing globally, it will never produce the growth rates needed to break the cycle of poverty and inequality.

In the short term, that means continuing to disappoint a black majority angry at the persistence of economic apartheid. The alternative is to redistribute more income and assets of the white elite. Neither is likely to do much for race relations. If Kruger stays in Church Square, the barbed wire protecting him will probably remain there too.

A few body blows that hit pretty close to home – not much to say really, sometimes the truth can be a bitter pill to stomach.

Chin up folks.

[source:ft]