Word: anc
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...created millions of refugees. At the U.N., South Africa has consistently defended some of the world's worst regimes - Burma and Sudan, as well as Zimbabwe - against punitive international measures, apparently more concerned about Western bullying than the way governments treat their own people. As Feinstein says, the ANC "hasn't sent a great signal to other countries in Africa that are trying to build democracy and progress...
Problems at Home If there is one region in South Africa on which the ANC might have focused its efforts to build democracy and progress, it is the Eastern Cape around East London. Drive out of the city and after an hour you descend into a steep, forested canyon along whose floor snakes the River Kei, the old boundary between white-run South Africa and the rolling prairies which apartheid authorities designated the black "homeland" of Transkei, meaning "across the Kei." During apartheid, the Transkei was a place of destitution: thousands of mud-walled, grass-roofed huts where people lived...
Which makes it all the stranger that the ANC has done so little to improve the region. Today much of the Eastern Cape is still typified by mud-walled, grass-roofed huts without running water, where boys ride horses, girls carry babies on their backs and families subsist on cattle, sheep, goats, chickens and maize. A new power grid has reached most homes - but supply is erratic. Most roads remain unpaved. In Mthatha, 74% of the population earns less than $150 a month and 43% are unemployed, according to a June 2008 report by the South African Medical Journal...
...unemployment and the poverty," she says. "This is not a happy town." An hour away in the village of Mvezo, where Mandela was born 90 years ago into a small gathering of huts on a narrow, windswept spur, the Mandelas' immediate neighbors are outspoken about their disillusionment with the ANC. "My life was better during apartheid," says Vincent Ntswayi, 53, who held a steady job in Johannesburg during white rule but has only been intermittently employed since. "Freedom turned out to be just a word. Real freedom, real power, that comes from money - and I haven't got any money...
...Mvezos in South Africa, hundreds of Mthathas and hundreds of big city townships too. In 2006, the South African Institute of Race Relations estimated 4.2 million South Africans were living on $1 a day in 2005, up from 1.9 million in 1996. In its 2009 election manifesto, even the ANC admits inequality has increased. "There are a handful of extremely wealthy people whose lives have changed dramatically," Suzman told Time before she died. "But the vast majority has been left behind. And there is a very clear link between that nondelivery and the violence and protests we experience. People...