Jonny Steinberg: belief

Transcript context

…What did go wrong with the ANC? I think the ANC governed reasonably well for 15 years. They were very lucky that they caught a commodity supercycle. They benefited greatly from China’s rise. And in the first 15 years of democracy, literally everybody did better. The bottom two deciles of South African society were earning about twice as much as they did at the end of apartheid. And the ANC managed that wave reasonably well, built a reasonably sunk state. What happened in 2007, 2008 is that there was something of a revolution inside the ANC. The thwarted, frustrated provincial middle-class essentially took over the organization and the state, and their politics was pretty nihilistic. They were very, very racially brittle people. They didn’t believe that anybody else was capable of building a future in such a difficult country. And they began fleecing the states through their position in power and in the bureaucracy. It was tragic to see. As I’m sure you know, there’s been plenty of discourse in the United States over the last year about Afrikaner farmers, claims about how many are being murdered or having their land taken. Set us straight on what you think is really going on.…

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