South Africa is a Warning to the West

Twenty years ago South Africa was the strongest economy in Africa. Apartheid was over, the country had world-class companies and rich deposits of precious metals and gems, and its streets were warm places to be. Today mobs with machetes, regular mass shootings, armed robberies and kidnappings are normal there. The murder rate is about ten times America’s, and six South African cities are among the fifty most violent in the world.

South Africa did not fail overnight. It failed one public service at a time. The electricity went first, then the railways, then the police. Each time, the people who had money paid for a private replacement and carried on. Britain and America have begun losing public services the same way, and the same replacements are already on sale there. The country on South Africa’s northern border, Rhodesia, which is now Zimbabwe, had gone the same way a generation earlier.

Core takeaways

• In 2009 Jacob Zuma became president of a country that works as a one-party state. A committee of the governing party put his allies at the top of the state’s institutions, and the Gupta brothers, a family in business with him, built an empire inside them. About 65 billion dollars was taken.
• Eskom, the state power company, once exported cheap electricity and now cuts the power on a schedule for 2 to 12 hours a day. The commuter railways carried about 600,000 people a day in 2008 and fewer than 14,000 last year.
• South Africa has about 2.7 million registered private security officers and fewer than 150,000 police for about 62 million people. People with money use cars, guards, generators and walls in place of trains, police, the power grid and public space.
• The people who took the money won. Zuma served about two months in prison, and two of the Gupta brothers escaped to Dubai. About a million skilled people have left the country.
• Rhodesia, next door, went first. Its population outgrew the welfare that its small white population could pay for. A Marxist movement won the war that followed and gave the farms to its loyalists. The breadbasket of Africa now starves.
• Britain and America show the early signs. 72% of British burglaries are closed with no suspect identified, and companies sell cameras, plate readers and patrols to people whose taxes already pay for police.

The president, the party and the family

The decline starts in 2009, when Jacob Zuma became president. One party, the African National Congress, dominates South African politics so completely that the country works as a one-party state. A committee of that party placed Zuma’s allies at the top of the state’s institutions. The Gupta brothers, a family in business with Zuma, then built a commercial empire inside the state. Zuma once flew about 200 guests into a military base for a Gupta wedding.

The lights

The first thing the public noticed was the lights going out. Eskom, the state power company, had once exported cheap electricity. Zuma’s circle treated it as a source of cash instead of building new power stations. Eskom paid about 80,000 rand, which is about 4,500 dollars, for a single knee pad. A new chief executive brought in investigators. Someone poisoned him with cyanide, and he nearly died. Without enough power stations, Eskom began switching the electricity off on purpose, to a schedule, for between 2 and 12 hours a day. South Africans call this load shedding.

The railways

In 2008 the commuter railways carried about 600,000 people a day. Gangs stole the cable and the signalling equipment, nobody intervened, and last year the network carried fewer than 14,000 people a day.

From the World Cup to the currency crash

The football World Cup of 2010 was a brief high. In 2012, at Marikana, police shot dead 34 striking miners who worked for the mining company Lonmin. Unrest followed, and Julius Malema rose as the radical alternative to Zuma.

Zuma had his private mansion upgraded, and when the details leaked, his swimming pool was listed as a fire pool. In 2015 he fired a respected finance minister. The Guptas had lined up a replacement who would benefit them, and the currency crashed. Declassified documents show the bribes. Offers of about 600 million rand, which is about 40 million dollars, went into accounts the recipients chose. The cash handed to connected people comes to well over 200 million dollars.

Johannesburg

Johannesburg, which was once called Africa’s Manhattan, has a 54-storey residential tower. When a restoration was attempted, a pile of rubbish nearly 13 storeys high was found inside the tower, with 23 bodies in the pile. Hundreds of other buildings in the city have been hijacked, which means taken over by people who do not own them.

The police, and the guards who replaced them

The police were underfunded. Nelson Mandela Bay, a city of about a million people, had one working rapid-response vehicle, and that vehicle had more than 300,000 kilometres on it. The country now has about 2.7 million registered private security officers and fewer than 150,000 police officers, for a population of about 62 million. The private guards outnumber the army and the police combined.

People with money stopped needing what the state provides. They do not need the trains because they have cars. They do not need the police because they have guards. They have generators in place of the power grid, and walls in place of public space.

The racial laws

South Africa has about 145 racial classification laws, and the result is a state that is permanently divided by race. The laws can also shut out black South Africans. The formula follows the national population, so where the local population differs from it, the people shut out are black. The laws came out of the push for racial equity after apartheid, and the inequality that push was aimed at was brutal. Meanwhile white pensioners are attacked on their farms, and vigilantes carrying automatic weapons arrive before the police do.

Nobody was punished

The African National Congress forced Zuma out in 2018, and a judicial inquiry followed. About 65 billion dollars had been taken in total. A term was coined for it, state capture. State capture means that the people who run a state arrange it so that taking its money is legal.

McKinsey, the international consulting firm, took part in a bribery scheme for Eskom and railway contracts and made about 85 million dollars in profit from it. It later paid more than 122 million dollars to settle criminal charges in the United States.

Zuma was sent to prison and released after about two months. His imprisonment set off riots that killed more than 350 people. Two of the Gupta brothers escaped to Dubai, and the attempt to extradite them failed. Zuma later visited the remaining brother in India and called him a brother and a friend.

The people who took the money won. They faced almost no punishment, and the inquiry’s endless report goes unread. They live beside swimming pools while the population pays. The next president came in talking about fighting corruption. Robbers then found about 580,000 dollars in foreign cash hidden in his furniture, and he said it was the payment for 20 buffalo.

Who left and who came

About a million people have emigrated, among them doctors, engineers, other skilled workers and business owners who paid tax. The gaps were filled with cheap labour from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi and Lesotho. Counts of the foreigners now in the country range wildly, from 4 million to 14 million. South Africans have turned on them, with identity checks at hospital doors and songs with lines like “burn the foreigner”.

Rhodesia went first

The country on South Africa’s northern border went the same way a generation earlier, and it fell further. It was called Rhodesia then and is called Zimbabwe now.

Before the colony, the tribes of the region were at war with one another, and most children died young. Families had as many children as they could, and with luck two survived. British settlers came for the mines and negotiated mining rights with the local people, and the colony of Rhodesia was founded. Life improved immensely for the Africans who chose to deal with the Rhodesians. Their children stopped dying in large numbers, and the wars between the tribes stopped. Those who did not want to join the new society could stay on the tribal trust lands, which was their right. Life was good enough that a third of Rhodesia’s black population were immigrants from the neighbouring African states, and the country became the breadbasket of Africa.

Rhodesia’s government knew that democracy is an expensive social technology that cannot be imposed on a people to whom it is foreign. The institutions have to be built and trust gained first, or the democracy falls, as it did in the colonies that adopted majority rule too fast. So Rhodesia was not a true democracy. Only literate property owners could vote, which left the small white population in almost total control of the government. At the same time the government spent heavily on educating the black population, so that it could eventually take part.

The problem that broke Rhodesia was its population. Families kept having as many children as before, and now the children lived. The population exploded past what the country could support. The surplus depended on social welfare, and almost all of that welfare was paid for by the small white population. Eventually Rhodesia could not afford it. That left a large number of disaffected young people, and they were easy to radicalise.

Two Marxist terrorist groups came out of that. ZIPRA was led by Nkomo, and ZANLA was led by Mugabe. They went after people who could not fight back, who were women, children, missionaries and Red Cross workers. The war is often described as white against a black majority, and that description is propaganda. Most of the Rhodesian army was black, and the two groups put as much effort into killing each other and other Africans as into killing white Rhodesians. Rhodesia won every major engagement and still could not win the war. The international community demonised it as a racist regime, put it under sanctions, and funded the terrorists. ZANLA won in 1979.

The first thing Mugabe did in power was carry out a genocide against Nkomo’s tribe and wipe out what was left of ZIPRA. Then he took the farms and the wealth of white people and of rival tribes and gave them to his loyalists. The loyalists could not run the farms. The country that had been the breadbasket of Africa now has people starving to death in its streets, with their human rights trampled. Black Zimbabweans today say openly how much better life was under Rhodesia, and the government is offering reparations to whites for the atrocities they suffered, in the hope that they will come back and repair the economy.

Britain and America

South Africa shows the decline of the West further along and moving faster. The West already has the early signs. Potholes go unfilled, parks are sold off for office blocks, and taxes rise. In America, calling an ambulance is a financial gamble. In Britain the waits in the National Health Service push people into private treatment.

Americans’ confidence in their police collapsed after 2020. In Britain 14% of people trust the police to deal with minor crime, and 72% of burglaries are closed without a suspect being identified.

Companies now sell the replacement. Ring sells doorbell cameras, Flock sells licence-plate readers, Palantir sells data software, the Citizen app sends crime alerts, and private security firms sell patrols. This fails the citizen twice, because the service his taxes pay for is taken away and he is then sold an expensive replacement for it.

The richest people in the West have already made the choice that South Africa’s rich made. Western billionaires such as Thiel, Zuckerberg and Altman have gated compounds and bunkers. Reid Hoffman has said that more than half of Silicon Valley’s billionaires have what he calls apocalypse insurance.

The same preference for equity over merit has appeared in the West. Cheshire police declared 127 candidates to be of equal merit, so that it could then choose among them by protected characteristics. Matthew Furlong, a white, heterosexual man who was turned down, won his discrimination case at a tribunal.

One failure at a time

South Africa did not wake up one day as a failed state, and the West will not either. The electricity went, then the trains, then the police. At each step the wealthy moved further behind walls, and the middle class took to watching their streets through cameras. The poor were left to enforce their own order. The people who had hollowed out the state went to live in bunkers. Rhodesia got to the end of this a generation ago and is now offering whites reparations to come back. Britain and America are near the beginning, where British police close most burglaries without naming a suspect, Americans have lost their confidence in theirs, and the citizens of both are already buying the cameras and the guards.

Related pages

• Britain - Poorer Than Mississippi holds the British decline in income, investment, housing and the health service that this page’s British examples sit inside.
• Europe - The Slow Agony holds the same quarter century for the European Union.
• DEI as Anti-Discrimination holds the ten common defenses of diversity programs, the Western form of equity over merit that the Cheshire police case is an example of.
• Mass Immigration - Cohesion holds who a country admits and whether they can share one settlement, which is the question behind South Africa’s 4 to 14 million foreigners.
• The Organized Minority holds why a small organised group ends up governing any country, which is what the party committee and the Guptas were.

Open questions

• Zimbabwe is now offering reparations to whites in the hope that they come back. Does a country that reaches that point recover, and do the people who left return?
• The president who followed Zuma promised to fight corruption and was then found with foreign cash in his furniture. What would a successor have to do to undo a capture that made the taking legal?
• Which public service goes first in Britain and America, and is the order the same as South Africa’s?

Sources

• Moon, How South Africa Became 3rd World in 10 Years (YouTube, 2026-09-15, 16 min 10 s). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKGGUexEhUw. Read from YouTube’s auto-generated captions. Every South African and Western figure on this page is as given there.
• Basic Logic, Rhodesia (Modern Zimbabwe) Explained In 3 Minutes (YouTube, 2025-08-28). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGiZsuB-DIk. The Rhodesian account in full.