SOUTH-AFRICA

Official Name          : Republic of South-Africa 

Capital                     : Pretoria, Bloemfontein and Kaapstad

Currency                  : Rand (ZAR) 

Language                : Afrikaans and English and others 

Population               : 55.000.000 

Visa Required         : YES

During the negotiations between Mandela and the ANC and the incumbent apartheid president "De Klerk", in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as much as possible tried to turn the divided South Africa into an equal, non-discriminatory first world country. But the big question was how the white African and English speakers, who lived on the level of prosperity of the first world, and the black African speakers, who lived on a pitiful third world level of prosperity, could be integrated with each other in terms of race, culture. , language, economy, social, etc., without loss of wealth of the richer whites. These richer people should be the base for making their wealth accessible to other races, so that they did not have to start from scratch. A new and just constitution was also adopted.  

South Africa is now (still) a republic in transformation. It is still (since the negotiations a century earlier) a country with very large contradictions between rich and poor. Other than during apartheid, blacks now also belong to the rich class, the black nouveaux riches often have links with the African National Congress (ANC). In addition to connections with the ANC, the new realms of discrimination benefit; blacks are legally preferable to government jobs and are increasingly taking a chance at private companies. Yet only a small part of the population benefits from the 'new economy', the inequality between rich and poor has increased sharply, especially within the black population. While a small group joins the new multiracial upper level, unemployment is growing among the rest of the population. In 1995, when the 'rainbow nation' made the transition to a multiracial democracy, 16 percent of the workforce was unemployed. In 2006, the official unemployment rate had risen to 30 percent, the actual unemployment rate was estimated at more than 40 percent in 2006. The country has been plagued in recent years by corruption cases to President "Zuma".

Problems in South-Africa

One of the biggest problems in the “new” South-Africa is crime. In 1995 the murder rates in South Africa were the highest in the world - on average two people per hour were murdered. The provinces of Gauteng and Western Cape are the most affected, Johannesburg was even called the murder capital of the world while the number of rapes is the highest measured worldwide. Another huge problem is AIDS. Just like almost the whole of Africa, South Africa is in the middle of an AIDS epidemic. A 1999 study showed that 22.4% of women who visited public clinics were HIV positive. The dissatisfaction with the situation of the Afrikaans speakers comes for the greater part with the still influential whites. They are frustrated that after 16 years the BEE project is still being used by the ANC government to force companies to adopt a certain percentage of black people. This percentage is so high that the white middle class can no longer work because their places are forcibly taken by non-whites. As a result, more than 600,000 white African speakers have been relegated to the level of prosperity of the third world. They now live in slums (or so-called "patcher's camp"). Of the originally 6 million whites in South Africa, nearly 2 million have left for Europe and the West. In addition, Afrikaans is banned by the ANC by calling it an apartheid language. In South Africa, a number of small right-wing terrorist organizations are active through the above-mentioned reverse discrimination. They are opposed to the black majority government, and want to return to the apartheid regime and political domination of (white) Afrikaners. For a number of bombings in Soweto in 2002, a number of alleged members of such a group, the "Boeremag", were arrested.