Having been there (2019) for 3 weeks...I’ll make three observations:
1. Tons of potential around the whole country, but massively divided among tribes, political units and social causes. Almost everyone will agree on major corruption prior to Apartheid, but corruption just doubled up after Apartheid.
2. If the country were divided...the Cape Town region (extending 200 miles up the coast, and 100 miles to the east) would do fairly well, compared to the rest of the nation.
3. All this water shortage business goes back to decisions in the 1990s (as major cities were expanding) that doing ‘nothing’ was the chief strategy of the national government. They refused to accept the idea of massive movement into the five big cities of the nation, and that their consumption would require major planning.
Oddly, when the topic of Trump came up...I had a number of SA’s (black and white)...curiously interested in him, and most feeling that that was the type of leader they needed there.
Miss the hockey’s running things much?
Here’s something no one knows. White South African now come here on temp visas to work for a few months out of the year in Ag industries. They make them go back (which most do); they come back every year for as long as they are allowed to be here.
Give it 20 years or so. Seems inevitable. We have plenty of examples in Europe. Czechoslovakia. Yugoslavia.