In the recent few days after the arrest of Former president of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, some of his supporters are claimed to have gone around creating riots & making people loot shops & malls. This extended to people who were likely NOT Zuma supporters but opportunists who wanted to score some free goods. Below are some points South Africans can take from the recent turmoil in South Africa. Whether you agree with them or not, these are the facts as someone who knows life on South Africa's streets.
• Inequality is not cool: Keeping a group of people poor while deliberately favouring others always ends badly.
• Our people are angry: Angry people seldom listen to authority. What's worse is our anger is not common anger, it stems from decades & maybe centuries of inequality. So when anger comes out, it seems so amplified & almost seems to come from nowhere.
• Politicians do not understand the people: If politicians understood the people, they'd do better in controlling the masses & riots.
• Racism in South Africa has developed to pure hatred of black people: Perhaps it's a case of familiarity breeding contempt or lack of understanding of black people i. e. ignorance but the settler/colonial/foreign races in South Africa (i. e. whites, Indians, coloured people who identify as white more than black) hate the indigenous black people. You ask, "Why don't they just leave?" That is a question I struggle with myself, maybe they've become too used to being the privileged minorities that they don't see life in any other way. They feel the need to make/have a group "inferior" to them. Very psychosocial & psychological stuff... Their stubbornness in wanting to stay in South Africa has become like a toxic drug habit/addiction.
• We are doomed as a country: Between poverty, lack of education, race wars, leadership incompetence, petty tribalism & riots, we're going down the drain fast & it's going to take someone who's going to have the courage to send Indians back to India, Europeans back to Europe, let the coloureds decide whether they want to stay or leave & return back to our precolonial nation states as indigenous black people becoming the last majority black country in Africa to get rid of it's colonial settler community. That is the final solution.