What can fix South Africa?

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

South Africa isn't the basket-case that it is often made out to be. To be frank, I think that the conventional wisdom about South Africa is permeated by racialist narratives; this is evidenced by the unyielding punditry about the ANC, which is nearly always portrayed as a malignant tumor that needs to be removed from the body politic and replaced by the DA. This is hardly subtle dog-whistling.

I'm not particularly fond of the ANC, particularly known cretin and fraud Thabo Mbeki, but it's more comparable to the INC than to the ZANU-PF. The ANC has presided over fairly substantial reductions in racial inequality, it has managed to attract significant levels of foreign investment and it has created a Black middle class. "Brain drain" and "white flight" are intractable problems but these problems are not entirely the fault of the ANC. Of course racist whites were going to resent losing their privilege!

Of course, the ANC is also, in large part, responsible for the shambolic response to the AIDS epidemic, which I'd argue has played the largest role in constraining South Africa's development trajectory.