While it is still impossible to give truly reliable estimates of AIDS in Africa in general and South Africa in particular, an increasing number of researchers are questioning the dire predictions. Horrific AIDS estimates, based on elaborate computer models, are being flatly refuted by actual on-the-ground testing in prisons, schools, and businesses in South Africa. For example, one widely cited computer-generated estimate projected that HIV infection was rampant at South African colleges, with one in four undergraduates expected to die within 10 years. But according to a report in the London Spectator, a physical test of 1,188 students at Rand Afrikaans University, which the computer had pegged with a 9.5 percent infection rate, revealed that the actual number was 1.1 percent.
Criminals and Regulators
One indomitable optimist I met was Michael Katz, introduced to me by a mutual pal in London as "South Africa's top lawyer." "When you were here in 1984, the crash was inevitable," he said forcefully. "By 1987 we were doomed....Then we had the miracle of reconciliation, and then the second miracle of President Mandela and nation building." Two miracles in one sentence. The word is used here more often than in the Vatican, I thought. "It's night-and-day better," he continued. "Access to water, electricity, and sanitation has just soared."
And the South African constitution, Katz said, is "one of the best in the world." Before ratification in 1996, "Parliament could pass any law it wanted untested against principle," he said. "Now constitutional supremacy has replaced parliamentary supremacy. We have a bill of rights. Laws can be struck down as not conforming to the constitution....We have entrenched individual rights as opposed to group rights."
But crime continues to be a serious problem. Tom Bouwer, of a group called Business Against Crime, reported that "post-1994, crime exploded, but maybe there was more transparent reporting. Also, all societies that are going through change are targeted by syndicates. And hungry people are easy recruits for crime syndicates."
The Law Review Project's Leon Louw blamed the police. "They go for soft criminals and victimless crimes," he complained. "They go for hawkers, not real criminals."
Wherever the blame might belong, private initiatives aimed at increasing safety and discouraging crime are quite visible. You cannot spend five minutes in South Africa without noticing how careful and cautious everyone is -- the locked car doors, the barred windows, the watchtowers, the 10-foot walls. Some neighborhoods block off all but one entrance road with illegal private "booms," or long pre-fabricated metal barriers that close the rest of the streets off to vehicular traffic. The chokepoint is patrolled 24 hours a day by armed guards, resulting in lower local crime but a sharp spike in vehicle traffic.
Getting inside a South African shopping mall is a bit like hopping on a plane in post-9/11 America. Of course, firearms cannot be taken into the malls, so one sees advertising for gun safes at the main entrances. There are closed-circuit television cameras, metal detectors, private guards, "24 Hour Armed Response" signs, and a pat down at the doors.
William Midgley, another prominent South African attorney, described the crime spike as a function of dynamic change. As noted, the commercial activity of the Central Business District has moved to the nodes or suburbs. Out there people once had big three-acre plots on quiet roads, Midgley noted; now the streets are clogged with traffic and business, and the land is "not secure, not maintainable." The result is a huge "densification of the use of land" involving "massive ongoing changes of use." It's all very restless, very like America...before it fell in love with development planning and containing "urban sprawl."
There is no real planning or zoning control. Big projects with expensive lawyers get permits, but for smaller ones public oversight has collapsed. Streets of bungalows have become offices. You do whatever you want. One of my hosts took me to his nice home and showed me a neighbor who was adding a new wing to his home with no permit whatsoever. The local bureaucrats "have no idea where the zoning plans are," my host explained.
"Are you freer today?" I asked John Kane-Berman, a key opinion leader and head of the South African Institute of Race Relations, a public policy organization. "In a broad political sense, yes," he replied. "But not in terms of moving around and personal safety. However, a P.C. tyranny has replaced apartheid. As an employer of 40 people, I face many new regulatory demands. Even under apartheid, I never had to break down my staff by race. Today as soon as my staff goes over 50 in total, the sex/race/disability plans I have to put in place involve forms as fat as the phone book."
Firms with more than 50 employees are required to hew to certain quotas based on race, gender, and physical disability. The "employment equity" rules have had the unsurprising effect of discouraging companies from ex-panding beyond 49 employees; instead they rely on sub-contracting. The government has reacted by reclassifying major subcontractors as employees.
In addition, there are billions of rands' worth of unclaimed, unspent "training" levies. These levies, paid by all firms, go into a general coffer administered by the state. Those firms that provide training are then allowed to claim funds from the pot. Firms pay the levies but simply cannot be bothered to reclaim them, even when they provide a great deal of training, because the paperwork involved is so vast.
These new regulations place huge burdens on the types of business the government should be encouraging. "We're just cutting and pasting wholesale large volumes of legislation from the U.K., Germany, Canada, and Australia," said Neil Emerick of the Free Market Foundation. Furthermore, Kane-Berman continued, while the governing African National Congress is focused on building stable black middle and upper classes, unemployment has doubled since 1994 because of strict labor market laws, racial regulations, and the reintroduction of foreign competition.
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