JONATHAN JANSEN | Be honest, are you better off now than under apartheid?
You can ask that question of almost any sector of the social and economic landscape, from education to health to urban housing
Try to answer this honestly. Do you think the state of the country’s overall infrastructure (roads, electricity, water supply, transportation) was better in 1993 (the last year of legal apartheid) than in 2023 (30 years since the end thereof)? I posed this on my Twitter feed and 89% of respondents voted “yes, definitely”, while 11% said “no, better now”. Of course, these Twitter polls are not representative of the general population, but 2,410 respondents are worth taking seriously. Now I do not know who the 11% are, but I suspect they live under rocks in the Karoo because news from the wealthiest city on the continent is pretty dismal: weeks without water, hobbled by daily electricity outages and holes like craters in more and more Johannesburg roads is not what we had on the eve of democracy...
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