A new party has been created by a British immigrant called Phil Craig who is the premier of the Western Cape, called the Referendum Party. It seeks the secession of the Western Cape from South Africa. What is envisioned is that a separate Western Cape will be free of the misrule of the ANC.
They indeed are correct that the ANC are corrupt and misguided. What they don’t understand is it is because the ANC have ingratiated themselves to western capital, which is a corrupt and malign influence. The power and influence of capital in South Africa is routinely ignored. Really we are ruled by a state-capital nexus.
They are indeed correct that the Western Cape (and indeed South Africa) is suffering from neglect, massive crime levels (particularly violent crime) and a general malaise which permeates our society. People don’t have work, or hope for a future. Education is poor, poverty is rife and people are desperate.
Their prescription is even more capitalism, even more austerity, even more sycophancy to the discredited west. This will not bring the hoped-for change, but rather deepen our existing problems, like massive inequality which is a source of so much discontent and misery.
It is due to chronic underinvestment by the state, reliance on foreign investment, that we are in our current situation. Foreign investors are profit seekers. They don’t want to help South Africans: they want to employ as few people as possible for as little as possible, while extracting as much as they can. Cyril Ramaphosa constantly courts these investors, and follows their recommendations in how to manage the economy. Thus we are investing less in healthcare, infrastructure and education than we should be.
They look at the legacy of colonialism with rose-tinted glasses, saying it brought development, education and infrastructure to the country. It only brought these things, to the extent that it helped white-owned colonial capital to extract wealth and settle in the territory to their own benefit. It was always exclusionary and did not seek to uplift the lives of ordinary Africans.
It reached genocidal levels, if you read some books like “Year 501” by Noam Chomsky, you will be shocked at the outrageous violence, contempt for democracy and freedom and self-righteousness which the colonisers have.
This legacy is still with us today, in the form of neo-colonialism. In this form of government, rather than have explicit colonialism, western governments set up puppet governments who will do their bidding and promote policies which are to the benefit of western investors. Western multinational corporations serve as the executors of this exploitative system. It was detailed in the book “Neo-Colonialism” by Kwame Nkrumah which is still relevant today.
African countries can only develop themselves by following the model which China has laid out: unite and reject Western influence, invest in their own countries, take care of domestic needs like food production, land reform and infrastructure development.