Black South Africans hold around two thirds of the locally held value of the Johannesburg stock market, this newspaper found last week. That shows how much the country has changed. The black middle class, civil service employment, and BEE share schemes are the reasons. Let no one tell you that the commanding heights of the economy are yet to be conquered. William Gumede, of course, suggests that around R1 trillion has been split among 100 politically connected apparatchiks. But that is a different problem and a different question – the racial transformation objective that has sat at the heart of government policy for 30 years.

So why isn’t this celebrated, loudly? Because everyone knows that it is largely meaningless when the unemployment rate is over 30% – which is to say that pursuing transformation measured as a percentage score on a scorecard for its own sake was the wrong policy all along.

Estimate the size of the middle class in percentages and you can see colour changing across markers from cellphone contracts to home loans and car purchases. How much has the overall middle class grown? You’d be safe to think it is twice the size it was in 1994, and work underway at this newspaper suggests that it might have been twice as large again had the economy simply kept pace with the global growth rate after 2008. But there is a difference from what happened after 1948, when the whites mostly became middle class. Through the 1950s and 1960s few whites were left behind. Now a black middle class has joined the white middle class of old. They are in business together and their children attend the same schools, but the great majority of black people have been left behind.

Again, the colour of the money has changed but the old dynamic of the elite vs the poor remains intact.

South Africans are now marginally more inclined to support the government siding with Russia and China than with the West. South Africa’s old default pro-Western orientation is being eroded and further shifting is likely inevitable. Last month, this newspaper reported how South Africans’ perceptions of who is winning the technology and AI races are also shifting against the West. It also reported that South Africans now view Vladimir Putin as more trustworthy than Volodymyr Zelensky, something the most informed people, who remember what James Baker (and indirectly Helmut Kohl) promised about an inch, may think reveals a wry astuteness in the South African public psyche.

On the passing of old guards and old orientations, The Atlantic published a stunning article about the UK. In grisly terms, it described how inhabitants of that beleaguered place are now practising dentistry on themselves because the local state healthcare system is such a mess. More is apparently spent on settling maternity lawsuits than on maternity care. And the UK is now poorer on a per capita basis than Mississippi, America’s poorest state. As this newspaper's main podcast discussed last week, Nigel Farage resigned his seat in Parliament in order to contest it in an election that will see him go up against Count Binface, a real person who wears a silver cape and a rubbish bin over his head, and something called the Official Monster Raving Loony Party. And the South Africans are wrong to look East?

Add to that the fact that the West exported climate hysteria and DEI ideology to South Africa, while China argues for pragmatic energy policies and merit-based appointments. But take your lead from the West – the lemmings say. It’s mad. Forty years ago, there was no doubt about whom South Africa should listen to for advice on how to run its economy. Now, the two centrepieces of Western policy doctrine need to be rejected outright for the damage they do.

But looking East for economics is not straightforward either – or at least less straightforward than at any point in the last 40 years.

China’s economic success has been spectacular. But there is now a crack appearing in the Chinese egg. That country’s budget deficit now exceeds the growth rate of its economy, an inversion of the economic pattern that prevailed through much of the past 40 years. The extent of the gap is considerable, and by some estimates the deficit runs at nearly 9% of GDP, which is twice the rate of growth that will likely be reported for its economy when new data are released this week. The trouble is debt on projects that may never be able to pay for themselves. When the American housing market crashed the global economy in 2008, the reason was NINJA loans, meaning No Income, No Job or Assets, which ignored borrowers’ inability to repay. The Chinese state is seized with the problem (unlike America ahead of 2008) and you’d be brave to bet against the skills and strategy being applied to fix it. But economics is the gravity of politics.