South Africa

The New York Times says South Africa is growing up.

Mr. Zuma found common cause with those on the party’s left flank, who felt shut out by the president’s policies of fiscal conservatism and his aloof style.

The leaders of the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the South African Communist Party are now the primary architects of Mr. Zuma’s campaign. They believe that as a canny but uneducated son of the soil, he is more in touch with the aspirations of South Africa’s masses, whose lives have barely changed since apartheid. Mr. Mbeki’s supporters, for their part, worry that a Zuma presidency might undo the meticulous stitching of the country into the global economy undertaken over the past 15 years.

That a majority of A.N.C. members have put their faith in Mr. Zuma is an indictment of Mr. Mbeki’s abilities to bridge the widening class divide. There is no guarantee that Mr. Zuma could do any better, but he is renowned as a consensus-building politician, and at least he would be required to try.

Ah, yes. Communism to the rescue. Led by an uneducated populist. All the hall marks of future success.

Had mister Zuma been educated he might have heard the following:

"Concentration of wealth is a natural result of concentration of ability, and recurs in history. The rate of concentration varies (other factors being equal) with the economic freedom permitted by morals and the law... democracy, allowing the most liberty, accelerates it." -- Will and Ariel Durant

Concentrated wealth of course furthers investment and builds up capital for further advances. Now if Zuma was a real Marxist he would know what Marx said about building capital. It is best done by capitalists.

I fear South Africa is headed the way of Zimbabwe with its economy destroyed and a politically induced famine. Of course Zimbabwe's leader Robert Mugabe was well educated. Maybe education is no inoculation from stupidity. Or else it made Mr. Mugabe too clever by half.