Political evolution

[davefreer]

Democracy beats the trousers off most of the other things on offer out there. That said South Africa is a good place to see that it still has some way to go before being the ideal method of getting the best people into running public service. Most of the electorate is pretty ill-informed, poorly educated, and strongly inclined to vote on tribal and

Comments

[reverancepavane]

The problem is good governance has to be learned from somewhere. It's not something that comes naturally; enlightened self-interest only works if there is a check to that self-interest.
Another example that all to readily springs to mind is Papua New Guinea. Has many of the same problems as South Africa, complicated by the pre-Western legal code of "payback" (it was estimated once that the standard weregild payment to settle all the feuds was on the order of five times the world's current population of pigs). Anyway it used to mean that getting elected to the General Assembly it meant your village got the road and bridge that election period and then everyone else would combine together to oust you and a new village got the road. It was a screwed dynamic that seemed to work. However with multinationals resource stripping, it's now much more open to large-scale corruption.
NB: it's been a few years since I last looked at our northern neighbour seriously and some things have changed for the worse (such as the thuggery around Moresby). Possibly some for the better.
There was an episode of Geoffrey Robertson's Hypotheticals (an interesting show that presented a problem to (in it's original aspect) politicians and lawyers and then complicated it, leading the politicians up a path of moral and ethical dilemma) dealing with the independance of PNG. The statement of the Australian Foreign Minister of the time impressed me a lot, when in answer to the possibilty of persecution of the ethnic Chinese minority (who were relatively wealthy merchants) stated he would grant them retroactive Australian citizenship and send the army in to get them out and PNG's economy could go where it deserved to go after doing something so stupid. Everyone on the show, including Geoffrey Robertson (nude croquet player extraordinaire) was amazed at the answer. They were expecting a normal wesealy worded political promise.
Oops. Rambling again. Please excuse me.

[davefreer]

Sounds like a foreign minister worth considering for higher office.