A letter to the president of South Africa - Thabo Mbeki

I visited South Africa two years ago and loved the people there but don't know much about political situtaion. Here's what I just found doing a search on what went wrong in South Africa. Banker's agents are heavily involved in inciting racial tension and violence everywhere.

“The forces of neo-mercantilist globalization responsible for South Africa's continuing economic and social chaos were entrenched years before apartheid collapsed. Indeed, when the apartheid government was clearly doomed, faced with overwhelming international protests and a strong sanctions regime at the climax of the Cold War in 1989, the international financial institutions (IFIs) stepped in. They were determined to influence the forces of social and economic change in the interests of international finance and business. In the early 1990s, the World Bank sent advisors to South Africa to recommend neo-liberal ideology and policies promising economic growth. In 1993, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) granted South Africa a $750 million loan conditioned on the adoption of neo-liberal policies. The IFI's neo-mercantilist policies emphasize centralized corporate control over under-developed economies through trade agreements while only allowing liberalization in areas that the developed economies and their multinational corporations already dominate, such as international capital flows. The globalization currently being imposed through the World Trade Organization (WTO), regional trade agreements, and IFI Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) hark back to l9th century imperialism. Now, as then, the resources of the imperial possessions in the periphery are directed towards the core developed economies-these days Europe, North America, and Japan. Unfortunately, Nelson Mandela and the new ANC establishment in South Africa adopted elements of the neo-mercantilist agenda enthusiastically in the first post-apartheid national economic program called the Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP). The RDP did retain some redistributive elements, but these were rapidly abandoned in favor of the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) program in 1996, due to the growing influence of the neo-liberals in the ANC.
GEAR was drawn up almost solely by 15 economists picked from the World Bank, neo-liberal think tanks, and various African development banks. The GEAR program emphasized commercializing and then privatizing all of South Africa's public companies and services. It drastically cut government spending and secondary taxes on corporate profits. It meant substantially and prematurely reducing tariffs designed to protect South Africa's key infant economic sectors, including textiles and value-added manufactured agricultural goods. GEAR also liberalized capital controls and foreign exchange rates that left the value of South Africa's national currency, the Rand, and South Africa's import and export economic activity highly susceptible to the volatile and rapidly changing nature of international capital markets. Thus South Africa, a newly emerging semi-developed economy, was forced to adopt economic standards of liberalization that no developed economy, including the United States, has been able to implement successfully. GEAR Turns The Screw South Africa's next president, Thabo Mbeki, elected in 1999, was even more enthusiastic about neo-liberal policies than Nelson Mandela and was one of the main political forces behind the adoption of GEAR. The GEAR program has accomplished the exact opposite of its stated aims. While the International Monetary Fund (IMF) praises the fact that the GEAR programs have resulted in an economic growth rate of around 3 percent for 2003, the Congress of South Africa Trade Unions (COSATU) and the ANC estimates that South Africa will need an economic growth rate of at least 6 to 8 percent to achieve even minimal reductions in unemployment. Although GEAR promised 120,000 new formal sector jobs in its first year of implementation, South Africa lost more than 100,000 formal sector jobs by the end of GEAR's first year. For the remaining 11 million employed people in South Africa in 2003, at least 4 million are employed in the volatile, low wage informal sector and engage in temporary, subcontracted economic activity ranging from prostitution to street hawking. South Africa, under the ANC, has the dubious distinction in 2003 of having a larger income gap between the rich and poor than any other country in the world except Guatemala. The most surprising aspect of South Africa's post-apartheid economic programs was that the ANC embraced these programs so wholeheartedly. South Africa, with its comparatively low foreign debt of only around 5 percent of its total budget deficit in the 1990s, was under no pressure from the IFIs. While highly indebted states throughout Africa were having neo-liberal programs imposed on them, South Africa adopted them willingly.
Read more here at Thirdworld Traveler

Also see my blog and article on deep conscious capitalism