Few things are more disturbing than the collaborative media silence that attends the ongoing disintegration of post-apartheid South Africa. The nation’s ruling African National Congress (ANC), led by President Jacob Zuma, is the essence of corruption in a nation with one of the highest rates of rape in the world, and a murder rate best described last September by MP Dianne Kohler Barnard of the Democratic Alliance, the nation’s second largest political party. “We have 47 murders a day,” she said. “That sort of figure is what one would expect in a war zone.”

In her book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot” author Ilana Mercer cuts through the tyranny of political correctness that surrounds the ostensible improvement that was supposed to have emerged in that nation, following the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990, and the subsequent adoption of a new constitution in 1994, enfranchising blacks and other minorities. While she rightly describes the “terrible injustice” of the apartheid regime that produced an average of 7,036 people murdered per year, she reveals the Western-celebrated ANC government saw an average of 24,026 murders annually in the first eight years of its existence.

The South African government currently estimates there are 31 murders per 100,000 people per year, which comes out to about 50 per day. That ranks the nation above drug cartel-infested Mexico, the nation of Rwanda that endured the slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu sympathizers in the ‘90s, and Sudan, where the government of Sudanese President Omer al-Bashir precipitated the mass slaughter and rape of Darfuri men, women and children that continues to this day. That would be the very same Omer al-Bashir the ANC allowed to leave South Africa on June 15, ignoring a pending arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC), which had charged him with multiple counts of genocide and crimes against humanity. In doing so, the ANC violated South Africa’s international legal commitments and its own constitution.

The same stench of ANC corruption applies to the aforementioned murder statistics: outside groups believe the murder rate is actually double that total admitted by the government.

Moreover, white Boer farmers remain a primary target. According to the Times of London, over 4,000 of them were murdered since the end of apartheid in a nation rated six on a scale of eight for genocide by Genocide Watch. Of the 50 murders committed daily, 20 percent of the victims are white, and the black on white murder rate is approximately 95 percent.

Some of the carnage is attributable to Zuma himself. In 2013 he led a crowd in a song promoting the murder of the Boers. “We are going to shoot them with machine guns, they are going to run… The cabinet will shoot them, with the machine gun… Shoot the Boer, we are going to hit them, they are going to run,” Zuma chanted. Hence it is no surprise the murder rate of white farmers is quadruple that of the rest of the population.

South Africa’s rape statistics are equally appalling. Approximately half a million rapes occur on an annual basis, of which only one in nine are reported. This amounts to 132.4 rapes per 100,000 people per year, far and away the highest total in the world. Many of those rapes are of the “corrective” variety, precipitated by legions of men who believe that raping a lesbian will “cure” them of their homosexuality. “There is a clear sense of entitlement to women’s bodies which underlies the general rape pandemic, and no doubt the attack of lesbian women or women who read as gender non-conforming,” says Emily Craven, policy and program manager at ActionAid South Africa, one of the first charities to document the use of “corrective rape.” “The notion that women do not need men for either economic support or sexual pleasure is one that is deeply threatening to entrenched patriarchal values.” Those same patriarchal values undoubtedly factor into the reality that for every 25 men brought to trial for rape, 24 will be freed.

They also factor into predictably twisted attitudes. According to research group CIET, an anti-violence NGO, 20 per cent of rapists insisted the victim “asked for it.” A related survey reveals 25 percent of Soweto schoolboys described as “fun” the local term for gang rape known as “jackrolling.” And many so-called corrective rape survivors have reported their attackers wanted to show them “how to be real women and what a real man tasted like.” Furthermore many rapists are not content with that crime: 32 women have been raped and murdered in the last 15 years, but since underreporting of such incidents remains rampant, the number is likely to be far higher. South African charity Luleki Sizwe contends more than 10 women are raped or gang-raped on a weekly basis.

In the economic arena, South Africa’s the primary reasons for a rapidly deteriorating economy are succinctly described by Mercer as “apartheid in reverse.” In an effort to correct the racial disparities of the past, the ANC established the Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) program, followed by Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE) program. This is a system whereby all enterprises public and private were required to “make their workforces demographically representative of the country’s racial profile,” Mercer explains. In 2013, ANC parliamentarian Mario Rantho described his party’s vision for government. “It is imperative to get rid of merit as the overriding principle in the appointment of public servants,” he declared.

The results were predictable. Black households saw their incomes shrink by 19 percent during the first six years of ANC rule, and the total number of persons of all races living in “absolute poverty” had doubled following the ANC’s ascension to power. Farmland confiscated from whites as part of a land-sharing agreement remains virtually barren. Life expectancy has declined from 64 at the end of apartheid to 56 today. And as The Economist put it, “Public healthcare, the roadways, ports and road infrastructure bear testimony to the insidious effects of racial preference on South Africa.” More recently, economic growth has been anemic, the national debt has grown by 44 percent, the nation’s rand-based currency lost 20 percent of its value in 2013, and the current unemployment rate stands at 25 percent. Moreover, the city of Durban has fallen off the list of the world’s 50 largest container ports.

And with those racial preferences, coupled with de facto one-party rule, came the inevitable corruption. Plum government jobs were given to ANC insiders, irrespective of qualifications, and President Zuma recently spent $24 million of public money to add a pool and amphitheater to his private home. Nonetheless he was reelected to another five-year term in 2014. Think-tank theorist Leon Louw, who helped defeat apartheid, characterizes the crime and corruption in South Africa as “a simple manifestation of the breakdown of the state. The government is just appallingly bad at everything it does: education, healthcare, infrastructure, security, everything that is a government function is in shambles,” he adds.

And it is not likely to get better. The Communist-aligned ANC has a vise-like grip on the corridors of power, getting 62 percent of the vote during the 2014 election. The second place Democratic Alliance, won a paltry 22 percent of the vote. Thus, it’s no surprise that the nation’s justice system as described by the Daily Maverick’s Ruth Hopkins is “broken beyond imagination.” South Africans are battling a dysfunctional court system “where lengthy delays put presumed innocent suspects behind bars for years, where overworked state-funded lawyers do not bother to question glaring inconsistencies, shoddy evidence and lying police officers,” she writes.

Politically-driven favoritism abounds as well. Richard Mdluli, former head of the South African police’s crime intelligence section, was charged with murder, attempted murder, intimidation, the kidnapping of a man who married his former lover, money laundering charges, fraud, theft, and corruption. All charges were dropped and he was re-instated after he sent a letter to Zuma and his police bosses promising to help Zuma win reelection in 2014. It was one of many cases where connections to Zuma have have influenced judicial proceedings conducted — or dropped — by the nation’s official prosecutorial body, known as the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA). Zuma himself had an astonishing 783 counts of corruption against him dropped a few years ago. “There is no political will to subject politically-connected people at the highest levels of government to the criminal justice system when there are allegations of wrongdoing,” wrote Gareth Newham, head of the Crime and Justice Program at the Institute of Security Studies in early 2014. Mdluli was suspended in 2012, but continues to live a lavish lifestyle underwritten by South African taxpayers. And despite renewed calls to push criminal proceedings against him, that effort remains in politically-influenced limbo.

Following their victory in 2014, the ANC promised to embark on “a second radical phase of the national democratic revolution!” that included the “strategic transformation of the ownership and control function of key commanding heights of the economy.” In short, the nation is on the fast track to emulating the disastrous policies of Zimbabwe, a nation destroyed by mass-murdering Marxist despot Robert Mugabe and his minions. And as goes South Africa, so goes the Western-promoted halo surrounding Nelson Mandela: shortly after his death in 2013, the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress both released official statements acknowledging his role as a Communist Party leader who served on the Soviet-backed organization’s Central Committee. Nonetheless, he remains a revered icon among Western apologists — one whose terrorist past of bombing campaigns against fellow black South Africans opposed to his communist predilections has been all but erased.

South Africa had the potential to serve as a great example of the cause of human equality winning out over prejudice and political injustice. Unfortunately, the far-left seized the opportunity to institute their policies of perpetual poverty, violence and race hatred. The failure of South Africa is the failure of the world to acknowledge this reality. Where it might have been a model for other nations, it instead stands as a dire warning — while the toxic seeds of leftist politics grow elsewhere, including in our own backyard.

Originally published at FrontPage Magazine.