No, it’s not apartheid or even the current riots.  It’s the government.

If you want to understand South Africa, and in much of what plagues all of Africa - read this editorial on the criminal incompetence of Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s current president.

You’ll begin to understand why Robert Guest, the Africa editor for the Economist and author of The Shackled Continent: Power, Corruption, and African Lives, fingers bad government as one of the two main sources of African’s plight.

South Africa is facing a dark hour.  One hopes the light from the 2010 World Cup lasts and does not simply shock the country back into darkness.