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Zimbabwe and South Africa (Update)

Update:  got a lot of pushback on this note, it seems that everyone thinks I'm a racist, maybe I do!  I don't know -- the real test would be if my daughter dated and married a black man...I will never know I don't have a daughter -- but it remains that your attitude towards race can only be judged by things that affect you directly.  The reason I went after South Africa, has more to do with the news over the pasts few weeks, where massive rolling blackouts across the country because it failed to invest in its infrastructure, and I compared South Africa to India in the 1990s.

I "knew" Rebecca Mark of Enron when she was their #1 in dealing with India -- we all stayed at the same hotel and all commiserated about how crazy it was to deal with India.  I remember Mark saying that she never worked in such a corrupted place -- and she included Aregentina in that!  In the late  1990s India had huge power problems because of procurement theft. The ex-CEO Escom, even when he was the CEO often complained about the level of graft in his company...the CEO!  

The Olympic games of 1976 were the death kernel of apartheid in South Africa...At that point, the country became a pariah, still took almost 20 years for the White nationalist regime to fall, but eventually, it fell and Nelson Mandela came to power.  A great charismatic leader of a people who had suffered tremendously under an aggressive and oppressive white-dominated regime.

IN 1980 Robert Mugabe took power in Rhodesia and renamed the country Zimbabwe, in homage to one of the many kingdoms that had flourished there in the 16th century (or thereabout).  In 1980, Zimbabwe was the breadbasket of Africa, but over a period of a decade, the rich white farmers saw their farms seized by the government and given to Mugabe's supporters.  More or less what Cecile Rhodes had done a century earlier.  The difference was that Zimbabwe was ill-equipped to finance farms, and the new owners were generally uninterested in farming.  Moreover, without capital, there was not much that could be done.  Zimbabwe went from being a massive exporter to a massive importer of food, despite having some of Africa's most fertile land.

It was pointed out to me, and I didn't know this, that Mugabe had always planned for the destruction of the country's agricultural sector -- He was not about to create replacements for the white farmers with black ones.  Instead, he made SURE, that no financial resources would be made available to the new owners (with the additional problem of a natural 10-year drought).  Resources had been offered by the World Bank but were rejected by the government, which saw food as an additional control of Mugabe's enemies.  Didn't know this.

South Africa is a different story but with a similar theme.  Canadian friends of mine encouraged by Nelson Mandela himself started a regional airline in the country.  their experience was so terrible that those three years and nearly $5 million in capital they have never mentioned again, and if you look at all their profiles their time in South Africa simply didn't exist.  They mentioned in private that the ANC was a mafia.  Monthly demands for cash under the table.  To this day the ANC plays the card of "not us" despite high-profile court cases naming names and showing videos of high-ranking ANC officials taking money (BTW the exact same thing happened in Argentina).

Like India in the mid-1990s South Africa is now enjoying the fruits of its corruption.  A court in 2022 found that over the past 10 years, nearly US$ 900 million had been stolen from Escom,  That contractor who got jobs got them because they payed-off some ANC official.  The result: the two most recently built power stations are inoperable, broken down because of sup-par parts and workmanship, and out of control cost overuns -- nothing fancy here, coal power station technology dates back to the 1950s.

All three countries have identical sickness, government-sponsored corruption.  Today South Africa is discovering the cost of this, with daily multi-hour power cuts.  In Mexico, PEMEX still manages to lose billions every year despite oil prices being around $80 per barrel -- and Mexico having one of the lowest extraction costs in the world, nearly as low as those of Saudi Arabia.

Who pays, the usual suspects, are the poor,  You can bet that Rich South Africans have discovered the benefits of batteries and solar panels.




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