South Africa's ANC is reaping what it sowed by adopting a policy of wealth redistribution rather than one of production.The miners massacre highlights how one group of an extractive elite, the white apartheid regime were replaced by a wealthy but largely no different black equivalent.
“South Africa is a social, political and economic disaster waiting to happen,” said Aubrey Matshiqi, a political analyst. “The anger is there. All you need is a spark, and then you will have social and political and economic veld fires burning out of control.”More here
These days it can seem that South Africa has been turned upside down. Relying on apartheid-era legal tactics, prosecutors have said they are charging 270 miners arrested after the melee, not the police officers who fired the bullets, with the murder of their colleagues.
It is not the first time an arm of government has been accused of adopting strategies from the apartheid era. Efforts by the government of President Jacob Zuma to criminalize publication of a broad range of information, to limit the independence of the judiciary and to give greater powers to unelected tribal monarchs have bled away support from the A.N.C.
While the end of apartheid transformed South Africa’s political and institutional landscape, placing blacks at the helm, it left the economic hierarchy largely untouched. A favored few black businessmen, many of them with deep ties to the A.N.C., have become wealthy. But for a vast majority of blacks, inequality has deepened.
The failure to transform the economy is one the A.N.C. freely admits. At a party conference in June, Mr. Zuma urged more radical steps, but such calls may have come too late, as younger, more aggressive leaders whip up the anger of the poor and unemployed.
