Jonny Steinberg: belief

Transcript context

…What does the optimistic case for South Africa look like? Because you’ve said some fairly pessimistic things, yet from my point of view, the one time I went, things were doing a bit better than I was expecting. Admittedly, I went to Cape Town, but I thought, well, there’d be electricity shortages all the time. There weren’t. There seems to be some capacity for renewal and self-improvement in the system, or is that just my delusion? No, it’s not your delusion at all. I’m replying to your questions, and maybe that’s what makes me sound more pessimistic than I am. But I think that what South Africa has — which is quite remarkable given what’s happened to it over the last 15, 20 years — is it has a very solid political center which is very hard to dislodge, and a pretty sane liberal-minded political center. It’s guaranteed 25 percent, 30 percent of the vote every election and is expanding. That gives a fairly solid rational basis to govern the country well into the future. A lot of the stuff that fell apart between 2010 and 2020 can be rebuilt, basic stuff like logistics and electricity and the basic plumbing of the country. It’s being very slow to rebuild, but it can be rebuilt. Whether it can do more than that, whether it can actually flourish depends on something much more ambitious. And that includes rebuilding a civil service which is really, really on its knees and whose personnel are animated by a very destructive ideology. And for the politics for that sort of renewal to be in place — we are not there now. And that may take some time, if it ever happens. So, I’m not despairing. I think that some modest improvement is possible and probable, but it is modest until something more fundamental changes. Should I buy land there? Let’s say I were a person of means.…

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