South Africa violence and the country's future?

The real comparison with the ANC is Fianna Fail. A national movement that delivered the country from apartheid (as Fianna Fail viewed they redeemed Ireland from British rule); a broad political church of consequence that slowly rotted from the inside; viewing their hegemony as making them the eternal 'natural party of government' (if people recall, this talk was very common in the Bertie years); becoming institutionally venal and a vehicle for the cynical, vain and those on the take.

The ANC has generated a political elite that you'd be tempted to say is every bit as bad as the white one that preceded it. The Mexican PRI party is another example of this phenomenon in action.

If we didn't have the release valve of immigration, where hundreds of thousands of underemployed young people who quit a dysfunctional Ireland for good over the decades, who knows what Ireland would have looked like. Bar the blip of Leamass (who ironically had a rather strong whiff of gunpowder off him) and aided by TK Whittaker's vision of a different economy, FF were as I described them. A post-conflict party, high on their own supply, enjoying electoral hegemony, who were stacked to the brim with mediocrities and the corrupt with ambition for themselves and not the country. Haughey would be well at home in the ANC - rhetoric, bluster, patronage, surrounded by servile acolytes and stuffing his pockets.

The PRI in Mexico the same.

Did you just link violence on the streets of Dublin to 'empty promises' of two parties that have never been in cabinet? How does that work? 😂

The ANC is not a monolith (much like FF of old) it has left, right and centrist wings. Thabo Mbeki was explicit about this, that the ANC is not a socialist movement, but a national liberation movement, and he would not allow the socialist wing of the party to make it so. The party has regularly expelled far-left activists in the past (leading to the formation of the EFF, who I'm sure you are familiar with and could tell us loads about).

If you want to make a 2D pixel art painting of a complex movement, go ahead, but you sound like Ben Shapiro-lite here.

I'll divide this response into two

(1). I'll not dispute that some of SF's communications have elements of populism about them, but to characterize them as out-and-out populists, and particularly in the Irish context doesn't really wash given other party's histories. Fianna Fail are really the OGs of populism in Ireland. For the longest time they were the 'keepers of the flame' 'the ordinary plain man's party' again' 'them fellas above in suits in Dublin' defending their interests against pernicious elites (even when they're the one with the hands in the cookie jar). A long history of buying elections and an unfortunate history of running the economy into the wall. As I said earlier, we should be thankful young men could take off to London and Chicago pretty much at will over the course of our history since independence. Scenes like the above video would have been very probable had that escape hatch not been available. Easy to forget that the government of days gone by intensely lobbied the US to keep on taking our young at various points. Unemployed South Africans have nowhere to go. We've always had a populist streak running through our political culture - independents engage in it on the regular and Labour have form going back through the years. The only major party that can credibly claim not to have really engaged in populism (although Leo has dabbled with inverse populism with his 'early riser' schtick) is Fine Gael, because they have historically been too tied to certain interest groups for them to credibly get away with it.

(2) Populism relies on there being some fanciful grand narrative of corrupt elites looting the country. This isn't a conspiracy in South Africa. The ANC and their enablers in the residual large industries in SA have ransacked the public purse since the end of aparthied. South Africa is the number one most unequal economy in the world by gini coeificient measures. Think about that. It's not kind of unequal, it's a global statistical outlier. About two percent of people in the country live lives as we would, the other 98 percent have next to nothing and have always had next to nothing. First world opulance for a tiny sliver of the population, and squalor for the rest. Quaint ideas like tut-tutting about mean tweets in Ireland and drawing inferences to the world of populism is something you can do, but it bears little relevance to the hellscape of SA and is almost completely besides the point.*

*There is by the way an out and out and very dangerous populist party in SA, and it's not the ANC. Julius Malema's EFF are what you're looking for if you're seeking to tar someone with the populist brush. You'll probably be hearing more from them on the international stage once this is done. The ANC are just vanilla goons in suits with a far too big cohort of kleptocrats and political incompetants.

Ethiopia is staring down a potential default. Inflation outstrips GDP growth by about a factor of 4 at the moment (inflation is running at approx 20%, not good news for a developed economy). It's devaluing its currency and its foreign currency reserves are being undermined by the Fed printing dollars. Currency devaluation in a developing economy is usually a Hail Mary pass to stimulate artificial productivity at the expense of structural reforms which are unpalatable. Ethiopia is a country that bet big on infrastructure, but a significant currency devaluation and hemorrhaging dollars mean inputs from abroad become a lot more expensive leading to cost overruns on big-ticket projects like dams.

Like all developing countries, its economy is precarious. It's a country worth watching as they have had massive population growth (and accompanying impressive GDP growth), but GDP (like Ireland lest we be reminded) doesn't tell the whole story.