When Mandela was elected to govern South Africa in 1994, he appointed elected parliamentarians such as communist party leader Joe Slovo to high-ranking government posts. South Africa now has a high rate of taxation, restrictive labor laws, is Africa's largest welfare state and has Africa's largest, most politically well-connected and politically influential labor union movement. As a result of the new South Africa's restrictive labor laws and affirmative action policies, a large number of educated white South Africans chose to emigrate to other nations. This response angered and dismayed former president Mandela, who had previously acknowledged that South Africa needed its educated white population to help rebuild the nation's economy.
Affirmative action achieved in the new South Africa what job apartheid had achieved in the old South Africa. In the old South Africa, certain professions had been reserved for "whites only," meaning that only qualified and educated white people could be hired to fill selected vacant posts during the 1960's and 1970's. As a result, large numbers of educated non-white South Africans that included professionals as well as trained and qualified non-white tradespeople, emigrated abroad to where greater freedom of opportunity was available to them in several other nations. The more recent emigration of entrepreneurial types from South Africa has impacted on the unemployment rate.
At the present day, an estimated 42% or 8-million employable non-white South Africans are unemployed. The unemployment among this segment of the population is higher today than at any time during the apartheid era. During the mid-1970's, the United Nations revealed that despite apartheid and despite South Africa's disparity in wage rates, black people in South Africa earned a higher per capita annual income than black people living elsewhere in sub-Sahara Africa. During the 1980's and early 1990's, the anti-apartheid movement promoted the concept of "revolution before education," encouraging thousands of non-white students to abandon their formal schooling.
Many mainly non-white South Africans have never attended a school, including thousands in the 20 to 30 age group who are deemed to be unemployable in an economy that presently has little need for an abundance of unskilled manual labor. This situation has contributed to South Africa's skyrocketing crime rate which has reached epidemic levels. Following South Africa's ban on gun ownership, disarmed citizens in record numbers have fallen victim to crime, including to armed gangs of criminals. This crime epidemic has not only overwhelmed a police force coping with low morale and a high officer suicide rate, it has also discouraged foreign as well as expatriate entrepreneurs and business people from bringing new investment into South Africa, to further develop and grow the economy.
South Africa's present day economics minister, Trevor Manuel, is a firm believer in Keynesian economic theory and regards it as the economic system that best offers hope for his nation's economic future. He rejected the idea of an all-out socialist economic system since his days as an anti-apartheid freedom fighter. The economic policies upon which he intends to build South Africa's economic future, are based mainly on a Keynesian framework.