Thread with excerpts from "South Africa's Brave New World." The white establishment gave up gracefully, despite having the military power to fight. The author himself fought apartheid and doesn't regret it, despite his findings. 
Immediate capital flight amid massive corruption from the ANC. Chief ambition of much of the new elite: opening casinos, assumed to be a license to print money. Shades of US states doing the same for tax revenue.
Assassination was a common tool for the ANC elite both in exile and again in power. The author believes the ANC was involved in the assassination of Hani, a left-wing ANC leader, due to his threat to Mbeki.
Arms sales as font of corruption. South Africa did not need and could not even use (due to lack of white pilots and operators thanks to affirmative action) advanced military equipment, but the procurers could grease their palms.
The ANC's leading brains, Communists all, did not understand the concept of shareholder equity or the need for a trade deal with the EU.
Mandela as King Lear, with enormous moral authority but too old to actually resist his more hardline race-communist underlings, who spoke with this voice. Shades of Biden. Not sure if the author is too kind to Mandela; I suspect wishful thinking.
ANC immediately purged the Civil Service of whites. A bunch of departments immediately collapsed and state capacity never recovered, but, hey, there were a bunch of well-paid jobs for blacks, so who can say what's really more important.
The ANC, being overwhelmingly actual Communists who'd planned on aligning with the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War, were totally unprepared for the actual international situation they faced and couldn't adjust, keeping up a constant anti-Western drumbeat.
Liberals, who'd seen apartheid overthrown due to a split in the National Party, prayed for the same in the ANC. It didn't happen.
The ANC inherited one of the world's technically-best water systems (and by far the best in Africa), and immediately began running it into the ground by not paying for maintenance.
Affirmative action basically reinstated apartheid-era job reservations, but with the races. However, white people could actually do the jobs, their black replacements couldn't. This crippled the state and many large businesses, which desperately shed employees to escape mandates.
Mandela's retirement speech blamed foreign NGOs, America, and opposition parties for South Africa's problems. The author (wishfully, IMO) thinks he was reading from someone else's script.
The Rand crashed at the end of apartheid. Seeing this (correctly) as a signal that markets didn't believe blacks could rule, Mbeki resorted to manipulating it, which eventually caused a fiscal crisis requiring 21% interest rates and economic crash to get out of.
The Goldstone commission was supposed to investigate all groups, but never touched the violent actions of the ANC.
The ANC failed to deliver on any of its promises after the first term. This did not stop it from easily winning reelection. I love multiethnic democracy.
White ANC ministers (also Communists) saw the Land Bank as a tool to help the rural poor, their black replacements saw it as a tool for self-enrichment and drove it into the ground.
Black elites believed they were omnicompetent because of how easily the drifted from high post to high post, not realizing they were beneficiaries of massive affirmative action.
Every ANC failures was attributed to apartheid saboteurs running everything.
AIDS devastated South Africa, while the ANC promoted traditional African medicine over (working) white medicine.
The intersection between AIDS and rape: South Africa has the world's worst rape problem, which has much higher HIV transmission than most heterosexual sex. This includes babies (as sex with a virgin is believed to cure AIDS). The ANC outright refused Western medical aid.
With cheap AIDS medication offered below market rates on offer, the ANC... refused, and continued to blame AIDS on poverty.
Author attributes the response to a racial inferiority complex. Straight AIDS is basically a black phenomenon and SA has extraordinarily high rates of rape (50% of all criminal cases), which made Mbeki feel uncomfortable.
Mbeki refused to take responsibility for changing black people's sexual behavior, instead blaming AIDS on Western colonialism (while Western countries lined up to try to give him medicine).
Mbeki/ANC backed Mugabe to the hilt as he destroyed Zimbabwe (including genocide, famine, and millions of refugees), seeing the Zimbabwe regime as kindred spirits.
Constitutional court sided with the ANC as a matter of course.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission covered up ANC crimes and greatly exaggerated those of its apartheid and Zulu opponents, with zero attempt to actually ascertain the truth.
Other countries loved the ANC and Mandela, but the ANC purged their civil service corps and as such had no trained diplomatic personnel, leading to constant disasters in Africa and the Commonwealth.
Mbeki tried to use South Africa's armed forces, formerly the 10th strongest in the world, as peacekeepers around Africa, but the armed forces were crippled by Affirmative Action (purging whites) and "general-heaviness" (using it as a jobs program).
During the Cold War, the ANC could enthusiastically support the Soviets and still be beloved of Western liberals. They didn't realize how quickly they could alienate them over Zimbabwe.
BEE was/is a well-known catastrophe. Companies forced to sell a certain fraction to black owners, leading to massive divestment from South Africa.
Africa owners/CEOs relied on still-white middle management.
Mining was SA's only really competitive international industry, which did not spare it from BEE mandates (51% black ownership, leading to immediate divestment) and expropriation threats.
ANC mismanagement was covered up by the China-driven commodity supercycle, which tripled prices for SA's biggest export (minerals), allowing for private sector growth despite everything.
Despite this, the ANC made miners get licenses from a bureaucracy that was very bad at granting them, crippling the expansion of the industry and tanking investment. ANC elites also demanded huge cuts for themselves.
The new BEE goons are like American robber barons, except they're totally incompetent rentiers rather than competitive and innovative entrepreneurs.
Companies were desperate and scraping the bottom of the barrel for legally mandated black talent, which did not exist. Sounds like here.
BEE destroyed the rail network to the point the miners asked to run it themselves, and also destroyed SA's nascent high tech industry, devastated agriculture, and wrecked manufacturing, leading to deindustrialization.
Crime got much worse under the ANC, and the police become incompetent, corrupt torturers. The prisons were much more loosely and inhumanely run than under apartheid.
Like the US and Canada, SA has extremely strong affirmative action for medical school. This has basically destroyed its once world-leading (famously: first heart transplant) medical sector. Practitioners needed to prove they were "correcting equities" to practice.
The collapse of the medical sector meant lots of easily-preventable dead babies, far more than under apartheid.
South Africa had the world's cheapest electricity and a robust grid at the fall of apartheid. ANC took advantage of this to not do maintenance and loot Eskom, leading to power shortages and blackouts.
BEE drove skilled white employees out of Eskom, with the usual consequences. Exacerbated by Eskom demanding BEE in suppliers too, meaning low quality and expensive coal.
South Africa's rail network was also run down and looted by its new black managers (this gets monotonous after a while). Half of drivers had fake licenses. Exporters deserted the unmaintained rail network.
Shocking no one, the sanitation system was also run down and looted, meaning garbage everywhere.
Whites are treated as tax cattle, blacks as aristocrats by the education system. Whites are groomed for entrepreneurship, blacks for no-show jobs based on taxing them.
Indians provided crucial financial backing for the ANC during apartheid. This did not save them from getting thrown under the bus for blacks.
Mbeki tried to eliminate his chief rival, Zuma, by means of a fake rape accusation. Seems familiar. Did not work.
ANC renamed a bunch of towns founded by whites after literally fictional black towns, inventing history from whole cloth.
Apartheid provided health, order, and growth. The ANC failed at all three.
The apartheid government also controlled the borders; the ANC opened them to millions of African immigrants and refugees. This with unemployment at 50%.
Apartheid supporters were 100% correct about the consequences of majority rule, opponents were wrong . The author, despite meticulously documenting ongoing collapse in South Africa, still doesn't regret fighting apartheid, which I view as intolerably shortsighted and cowardly.
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