In the 20th century, especially its latter half, South Africa was one of the richest and most prosperous first-world countries in the world. Its economy, infrastructure and government were completely on par with (and in some aspects even surpassed) most of the richest western European countries. One could even say that South Africa was pretty much in essence a rich European country in Africa.
There was, however, a rather serious human rights problem in the country: Apartheid.
This was an extraordinarily strict and very strongly imposed separation between white people and black African people, started in about 1949, so much so that the vast, vast majority of the black population of South Africa not only lived in completely separate regions of the country (with very strict border control within the country), but these black regions tended to be extremely poor and pretty much in essence some of the worst third-world regions of the entire continent. While some of the wealth of the white areas might have seeped into these poor areas, it was very little. And this separation of regions within the country was only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the absolute separation and discrimination between white and black people during Apartheid.
Because of decades of political pressure, both within the country and from the rest of the world, Apartheid was finally gradually officially ended in the early 1990's, and the entire country was unified and all the internal borders and separation were ended, both geographically and in terms of laws, policies, hiring practices, etc.
This event started a very temporary era of seeming prosperity in the country, where the wealth, economy, industry infrastructure and government could, for a time, support what was effectively a sudden increase in the population of the country (that this wealth had to support). For a period of something like 10-15 years it really looked like everything was becoming better, as more and more of the black population of the country was raising in living standards to the levels of the wealthier working class and even the middle class (with, of course, many individual people even raising to the richest upper classes of society).
The main problem with this was that the end of Apartheid, as good as socially and from a perspective of humans rights it was, pretty much essentially suddenly introduced tens of millions of poor people into the society. The problem with this is that there are only so many people that even one of the wealthiest countries in the world can support. And once the infrastructure of the country has to deal with such a sudden effective increase in population, it started to crumble.
To solve the problem the infrastructure of the country should have had to grow enough to compensate for the sudden effective increase in population. Power generation should have been at least doubled or tripled, new infrastructure should have been built to cope with the increased population and increased demand, and the economy should have likewise grown to support this sudden increase.
This might have been theoretically possible if everything had worked optimally since the early 1990's and a lot of effort would have been put into the development and construction of new infrastructure to run the country with its increased population.
But it was not. Pretty much nothing was done. The industry and infrastructure of the country is today pretty much in the same state as it was in the mid-90's (with, perhaps, the only thing that has significantly increased is the number of houses which have been built.) This means that, for example, electricity production is still at the same level that it was in the mid-90's, and even worse, which has caused extreme power shortages. The rest of the infrastructure of the country is not in a much better state.
One of the reasons for this is that ending Apartheid also radically changed the political landscape of the country. No longer were experienced and competent Europeans in charge of everything, but most of them were replaced by native Africans who did not have the same amount of experience, knowledge nor qualifications for those positions. The amount of corruption in the country increased significantly and a huge amount of money and wealth started being wasted (by ending up in the pockets of corrupt politicians instead of building new infrastructure and maintaining existing one.)
The existing wealth and infrastructure could only support so many new people, but it has reached its limits and now the country is on the brink of complete collapse. It just cannot cope.
This should be a warning to most European countries, but nobody is heeding this warning. What is happening in South Africa is inevitably going to happen in many European countries.
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