I'm not black, so I can't speak from personal experience there. I don't believe that the average black person today is financially worse-off than he was under apartheid. But as for quality of life, I do think he's not really any better off than he was overall. There are obviously a whole lot of factors at play. Since the 90's, a lot more blacks have been able to work at jobs they wouldn't have been able to in the past, so financially, there is a growing number of blacks who are benefitting. The 'reverse-apartheid' policy of affirmative action, which forces companies over a certain size to follow racial quotas when filling positions, has helped a lot of blacks get employed from the informal sector to the formal sector. However, lots of these guys never had the education or training for these positions, and generally either get stuck at the lower levels due to their qualification levels, or get unfairly promoted purely to raise the company's quota of black management. I've worked with clients who've had black guys promoted to senior management just for the sake of quotas, and their lack of overall understanding of the systems and departments they're managing is quite apparent.
At the same time, the quality of education has been steadily dropping from the 90s, and it's really quite terrible now. The ANC government has tried a number of things with the education system, and one has to wonder if the result is just due to their complete lack of competence, or if it's done on purpose to ensure that the masses of the country remain uneducated. We had a very decent schooling system for quite a while. Once apartheid fell, and public schooling was equal for everyone, people began realising that a lot of the black kids moving into schools that they previously weren't allowed to were failing miserably, mainly due to the lower standard of education they had received until then. So government lowers the standard of education across the board. Rather than maintaining the standards already set for maths, sciences, etc, the entire schooling system was shifted to a policy of 'outcomes based education', where more 'practical' skills were focused on. If the majority of the population isn't ever going to use trignometry in their lives, why teach that to them at a high school level, when you could rather be teaching them how to count change from a till instead? If the majority isn't going to be creating technical drawing designs, why show them how to use a T-square when they can focus on how to manually weld metal instead? A lot of people, myself included, believe that the reduction in the standards of education has happened on purpose, so that the large numbers of poor, uneducated people (who are pretty much all ANC supporters because they still associate the ANC with Mandela and liberation) will remain poor and uneducated, and continue believing that the ANC is their liberator and saviour.
Every ANC government, both provincial and national, as well as most municipalities, have been plagued with lazy, greedy, corrupt people. The politically connected get awarded over-inflated tenders, and get richer. The officials who grant the tenders get kickbacks, and get richer. The poor, who are supposed to benefit from these projects, end up with half-complete, poorly designed, badly implemented projects. The ANC government blames the legacy of apartheid for the poor delivery, and covers up for their ineptitude, and this is why they are pushing so hard for this secrecy bill to be passed.
I don't know of anywhere else in the world where a government official can be caught red-handed with corruption, and the majority party says 'we will deal with this internally as a party matter', instead of having that corrupt official go through the actual legal system. The ANC goes to great lengths to protect its members. A shockingly large percentage of politicians have criminal records, and not for apartheid-related activity either. Zuma's personal financial advisor was in jail for fraud, corruption and soliciting bribes. Zuma was implicated at the same time. Instead of completing the investigations into him, the special investigative unit that was created to handle these high-profile cases was disbanded.
Billions of rands that should go to servicing and uplifting and educating the poor instead goes into already-rich ANC officials pockets. Those same thiefs then go and look their own people in the eye and blame the white government of 20 years ago for their misfortunes. I suppose in a way they're right - if they weren't oppressed for so long, they probably wouldn't have the mentality that they need to become as rich as possible however they can now. But the sad reality is that the ANC fought for the liberation of their people, and now that they have it, they keep working to keep their own people back. The ANC works quite hard to maintain racial division in the country. Every time a black official doesn't deliver, he blames it on the legacy of apartheid. I'm pretty sure that in 50 years time, a number of blacks are still going to be blaming the legacy of apartheid for their lazy asses not doing the work they're supposed to be doing.
So yeah, while financially, blacks are a bit better off now than they were under apartheid, the reason for me saying that the ANC government is worse than the apartheid one, is because the ANC is keeping their own people down, rather than actually improving their lives. I know every government in every country has to deal with corruption and inept officials, but in South Africa, it seems that corruption is government policy with no shame attached. There are too many people who are literally untouchable purely due to their political connections. And the people who suffer are the ones that have always suffered - the poor blacks living in the townships.
