About four years ago, while finishing an article on the prospects of scientific and technological development in South Africa ("Vostok (Oriens)" N 4, 2007), I wrote that, despite all the problems and difficulties, South Africa has already entered the path of innovative development and its progress in this area is being watched with hope by the countries of the continent. Today we have to state with sadness that an inefficiently managed country, which is losing its scientific and human potential, will hardly be able to enter the world club of innovative economies. The economically active white population, which still forms the core of the modern scientific and technological structure of the country, is increasingly being pushed out of all professional spheres, and it is increasingly focused on leaving. A sharp decline in the quality of the state apparatus, glaring failures in economic planning (the energy crisis), the curtailment of major innovation programs (the production of fourth-generation modular nuclear reactors), the "ninth wave" of crime that has hit cities and farms, the increasingly aggressive and destructive policy of "large-scale strengthening of the economic power of blacks" and the mass emigration of qualified personnel, not just the whites, but all of this seems to move South Africa irrevocably from the " first "world to the" third." What previously seemed like a dangerous trend has now become, in my opinion, the mainstream of evolution, or rather the country's involution. South Africa, while still the continent's scientific and technological leader, is increasingly becoming an underdeveloped country.

Keywords: South Africa, knowledge economy, scientific potential, innovation.

The Republic of South Africa is the most developed country in the least economically developed continent. It still has cutting-edge science and technology, elements of a new, post-industrial innovation order (the country has created certain prerequisites for a knowledge economy - South Africa, according to available data, still accounts for two-thirds of the continent's scientific output, although this share is gradually decreasing), which is generally considered to be forming or should soon form in the world's development centers. It, like other African countries (though not to the same extent), suffers from many of the ulcers of the "third world" - the vast enclaves of poverty, underdevelopment, unemployment, crime, and the shadow economy that characterize the depressed periphery. Unfortunately, in recent years, there has been a gradual loss of the achieved heights and an increasing slide into this very periphery.

As noted by South African researcher Michael Kahn, "development along the path of innovation under the influence of domestic and global factors led to results here that extended far beyond the northern borders of this country, given the dominant role of South Africa as the" superpower "of Africa" [Forsyth, 2008, N 2].

A developed market economy, high-class science and technology, and good education at leading universities are important legacies and elements of continuity between the two countries.

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A white-minority South Africa and a democratic South Africa that seeks to move away from social and racial inequality and build on the best of what was achieved in the previous period. This is in theory. In practice, of course, development is taking place, but it is multidirectional (constructive in some areas, destructive in many others, not progress, but regression), and South Africa is gradually losing and has already lost much of what it has achieved. Advances in science and innovation are increasingly being undone by increasing widespread discrimination and the squeezing of qualified professionals from the white population under the banner of fighting the legacy of previous black discrimination. For South Africa, this is a path that leads only down. Unfortunately, even a more careful and wasteful attitude to the accumulated human potential, to white scientists and specialists (if it were, but alas...), who can only transfer the necessary knowledge to Africans and raise their professional level, might not be enough for successful development. In the face of a terrible, almost unprecedented crime spree in the world, which the new authorities and law enforcement have been completely unable to stop, a huge number of qualified professionals (who can count on working abroad), not only white, are simply fleeing the country or are going to emigrate in the near future. Not only highly qualified but also intermediate specialists are leaving the country en masse, not only white doctors, for example, who are highly valued all over the world (they already account for half of Canada's immigrant doctors), but also nurses-white, colored, and black. Quite successful qualified Indians began to leave actively, not seeing any prospects for themselves in the country and fearing for their safety.

L. A. Demkina's accurate observation about the gradual slide of South Africa into the state of an underdeveloped country [Demkina, 2006, p.140] revolutionized my assessment of the post-apartheid development of South Africa. While maintaining relatively good formal and economic indicators, the functional state of the country has clearly changed for the worse. This is also reflected in the decline of professionalism and responsibility in the work of various services and law enforcement agencies, and, quite clearly, in the degradation of large cities captured by the "third world", and in the arrogant ignorance of the words and deeds of the increasingly corrupt and less competent upper echelon. The "disarray in the heads" precedes and accompanies the downward slide of the administrative, economic, scientific, cultural and educational apparatus (with all the growth in the number of "diploma holders").

In general, it is premature to talk about a new post-industrial order, even in the most developed countries of the world, as something already established, since the industrial component of the world economy, "large, dirty, material - and energy-consuming, has not been replaced by miniature, robotic and waste-free production with a closed cycle, which is already fundamentally possible." but expensive (cheaper and more efficient technologies are often blocked by monopolies). It, this dirty and noisy industry, was moved from the world's economic centers to the periphery (the world's South with cheap and obedient labor and no serious environmental restrictions). And in highly developed countries, perhaps, apart from a number of new information and biotechnologies and supercomputers (and the developing military-industrial complex), nothing has really been created to replace the former industrial base. However, in many ways, the virtual Internet economy of leading countries and corporations with its financial "soap bubbles" is now experiencing a deep crisis, but continues to exploit the world's periphery. So, with a certain amount of joking, it can be argued that the old apartheid (separate development) has fallen in South Africa, but "its cause lives" all over the world in the conditions of global neocolonialism. In South Africa itself, a kind of "reverse apartheid" has recently emerged and is gaining strength - a forced "broad strengthening of the economic (political is already in the hands of - Yu. S.) vla, which causes serious damage to development, including the areas of activity under consideration-

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Broad-based Black Economic..., 2003] and the displacement of white specialists, who are generally replaced by much less professionally competent blacks according to "light" criteria. To this negative effect is added the impact of the global crisis (and South Africa, as a country with a fairly developed market economy, is deeply integrated into the world). According to many experts, this crisis has disrupted the stability of all industries and spheres of activity, while significantly increasing the degree of uncertainty of socio-economic development.

Since the second half of the 20th century, the beginning of the world scientific and technological revolution, when the invention of the computer opened up the possibility of intellectual processing of unprecedented amounts of information for humanity, the belief that the development of science and high-tech technologies is becoming a decisive or, in any case, one of the decisive factors of social development has become stronger. The most important catalysts for the rapid development of science and the introduction of its results were the Second World War and the subsequent "cold War", after which there is a significant decrease in the intensity of scientific and technological progress. Although the" posthumous fruit of the cold War", the information revolution (for example, the Internet appeared in 1990, as a development of the Pentagon) - the modern stage of NTR, which really changed our lives, continues, penetrating into all areas of intellectual labor and in the most remote corners of the planet. Intellectual activity today is unthinkable without a computer, Internet and mobile communication.

In the modern world, "everyone who can" strives to create an innovative or innovative economy based on the continuous production of new knowledge and technologies and their effective materialization in goods and services. This is the leitmotif of all economic development programs of large and small countries, liberal and not so much, striving to take a worthy "place in the sun" in the world economy. In South Africa, the only country in Africa that has its own economic, scientific and educational base for the formation of the knowledge economy, a powerful innovation breakthrough was observed in the 1940s-1980s-the era of the completion of industrialization and the introduction of the first achievements of the NTR, a huge "defense order" of the young Afrikaner-controlled state, infamous as the apartheid regime. The regime was well-deserved international condemnation for racial discrimination, but for South African science it was a golden age, followed by a certain decline associated with a change in political regime and the demilitarization of the economy, a certain "self-exclusion" from both science and the state economy under the influence of liberal development doctrines and a number of other factors.

In the early 2000s, South Africa returned to a more active state scientific policy. The national program "Innovation Towards a Knowledge-based Economy" was adopted here. It was prepared by the Ministry of Science and Technology, approved by the government in 2007, and has a specific time frame for implementation-2008-2018, although in the absence of well-developed and supported by specific funding mechanisms for implementing such a program and, most importantly, an increasing shortage of competent personnel, its time frame is quite conditional and there is already a clear lag behind schedule and refusal of essential programs. In general terms, this program was formulated at the beginning of the decade, by 2002, when the National Strategy for the Development of R & D was adopted and a separate Ministry of Science and Technology was allocated for its implementation (previously science was "in one bottle" with culture and art), the National Strategy for the Development of Biotechnologies was adopted and implemented with more or less success (2001), advanced industrial technologies (2006), nanotechnologies (2007), etc.

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In the works of South African researchers, the most interesting, though not indisputable, are the views and conclusions of one of the leading scientists of the Council for Humanities Research, founder and head of the Center for Analysis of Scientific, Technological and Innovative Indicators at this Council, Michael Kahn (his articles are published in Russian in the Moscow magazine "Foresight").. The author makes what seems to be a largely correct idea that in the history of mankind, powerful spurts in scientific and technological development were usually associated with some serious crises and the mobilization of material and intellectual and spiritual resources necessary to overcome them (world and civil wars, for example), and in relation to South Africa, there is a mobilizing role of the state of the role of World War II and apartheid-induced international isolation for import substitution and development of one's own scientific potential:

"A modest innovation system, driven by the apartheid-induced economic crisis (industry was both constrained and protected by protectionist barriers and sanctions; production was mainly aimed at replacing imports), social and educational systems, has produced world-class scientific results in areas such as (chemical) catalysis, clinical medicine, botany and zoology, and mining business, metallurgy, electronics and entomology. The country has given the world four Nobel laureates who won prizes in the early stages of their careers... By 1994 (the year of the end of apartheid. - Yu. S.) the rate of economic growth has fallen catastrophically... In addition, the "rainbow nation "(as South Africa is sometimes called - Yu. S.) was influenced by two constructed crises: modernization in the context of globalization and the crisis of integration - a mirror image of the crisis of isolation as a result of apartheid" [Forsyth, 2009, N 2].

The assessment is succinct and convincing, however, from the above excerpt and other publications by M. Kahn, it is not clear what the crisis of the educational system could have done to achieve world-class scientific results, and whether this crisis was at all... (it is difficult for authors of coherent theories: all the time they have to adjust life to some schemes). D. Kaplan notes the important role of industrial policy and the increase, although small, in the share of high-tech exports in total exports of South Africa as a result of the functioning of the innovation system [Kaplan, 2006].

Globally, the apartheid-spurred innovation spurt in South Africa occurred during the period of a powerful deployment of the global scientific and technological revolution in the context of the Cold War and the confrontation between two systems that raised science and technology to "cosmic heights". As the Russian economist and thinker Mikhail Delyagin writes, " after all, the discovery of new technological principles (and not their implementation in technologies of commercial value) is fundamentally anti-market! The investor does not understand the meaning of what scientists are asking him for money, but he knows that there may not be any result, and if it does happen, no one knows what it will be and when it will be achieved. You can only do this on pain of death, which disappeared with the end of the cold war. As a result, the rate of discovery of new technological principles has sharply decreased over the past 20 years. " [www.delyagin.ru].

The dismantling of apartheid, which had largely exhausted its economic and political potential, and the transition to an inter-racial democracy led to positive changes (breaking out of international isolation, increasing the economic situation, improving the use of resources of the black population), but also serious failures (a sudden energy crisis) associated with the decline in management competence noted by experts (Russian researchers I. I. Filatova A. B. Davidson in [Filatova, Davidson, 2009, p.191] speak about "a sharp deterioration in the work of all parts of the state mechanism" in the post-apartheid period), an increase in social differentiation and crime.

And yet, according to M. Kahn, " the main failure was the inability of society and the government to limit and eliminate the AIDS epidemic. This also led to a crash in the system

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cultural values... It has the highest HIV prevalence rate in the world... the dynamics of the figures (mortality) is similar to the situation in a warring state: mainly the population between 15 and 45 years old dies, rather than children and the elderly. The government responded to the spread of the epidemic slowly, reluctantly and ineffectively " [Forsyth, 2009, N 2].

In general, the fight against AIDS in South Africa is a separate topic. The country with the best medicine in Africa brought the epidemic of this disease to a pandemic under the "wise" leadership of the former president of the country, Thabo Mbeki (ruled in 1999-2008), who declared HIV/AIDS is a product of racial discrimination and poverty, and has banned the import and manufacture of expensive but life-saving drugs (and the lives of infected women's babies)locally antiretroviral drugs. The Minister of Health in his office advised treating the disease with beetroot (for which she went down in history under the name "Doctor Beet") and dismissed doctors who injected the necessary drugs at their own risk. The future president said that this infection is easily washed off by a shower. Now belated measures are being taken, but time is lost, millions have died and will die again.

As M. Kahn notes in the above-mentioned article, sound government regulation can stimulate innovation, but acquiring the necessary skills and choosing the areas of innovation takes time, and for now "conceptual statements" prevail, since the government's strategic plans, which contain a number of high-order goals, do not contain any specifics or details about what, who how and when it should be done (given the current quality of state planning, which manifested itself in the energy crisis, it is hardly necessary to expect reasonable regulation of innovation activities).

If we follow the logic of M. Kahn, who calls crises political cholera, from which humanity has to invent medicines and vaccines, a new crisis will lead to the mobilization of resources to overcome it, especially since the internal problems of South Africa, as already noted, are now aggravated by the crisis of the global financial and economic system. In South Africa, the new administration of President Jacob Zuma and the new Minister of Science and Technology Naledi Pandor are considering some new approaches to new and not new problems. Some changes are planned (at least, the fight against the AIDS epidemic has already been forcibly strengthened). But there is little hope for a serious improvement in the quality of state regulation of R & D due to the obvious decline in the professional level of the state apparatus and the emigration of the best scientists. As Mrs. Pandor herself noted, if there are no scientists, there will be no discoveries [Business Day, 17.09.2010].

Among the most important parameters that characterize the country's scientific resources, the knowledge intensity of the economy, are investment in science and education, financing of innovative processes, in particular, the share of R & D expenditures in GDP. Although there is no close correlation between the level of development of scientific potential and the country's economy as a whole and the share of R & D expenditures in GDP, this correlation is usually much higher in developed countries than in developing ones.

R & D spending in South Africa was expected to exceed 1% of GDP in the coming years (0.93% in 2007/08), which would allow it to come close to the level reached under apartheid (1.1% of GDP in 1991), when science was considered as one of the strategic factors for the regime's survival [National Survey of Research..., 2007/08]. According to this indicator of" science intensity", South Africa's GDP is close to modern Russia (1.28% of GDP), where the state of affairs in science is still far from prosperous (for comparison, the USSR allocated 3.5% of GDP to science in 1990). By 2018, these expenditures in South Africa were planned to reach 2% of GDP, that is, to the level of highly developed countries (the OECD average is 2.3%: from 0.62% in Greece to 2.68% in the United States and 3.98% in Sweden) [Innovation Towards..., 2007, p. 9]. South Africa spends significantly more on education due to its lag in human / human resources.

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Here are some key indicators of R & D development in the current decade:

2002/2003

2007/2008

R & D development costs (billion rand)

7.5

18.6

same in % of GDP

0.76

0.93

Total number of people employed in R & D (ths.)

26.9

40.1

the same applies to full-time employment

21.2

31.4

including researchers

14.1

19.3

Percentage of female researchers

36.0

40.3

Source: [South African National..., 2002/03-2007/08].

Overall, R & D spending has been growing at a faster pace over the past decade, at 8-9% per year in real terms, although this growth has slowed in recent years and is now almost nonexistent. A wake-up call came in 2009, when the results of the 2007/08 R & D census were published - for the first time in many years, the share of R & D in GDP did not grow, but decreased, albeit slightly, from 0.95% to 0.93%. Of course, we can assume that this change is within the statistical margin of error, but still it was a growth stoppage, indicating that the overall modest goal of bringing this share to 1% by 2008 was not fulfilled. Recently, the results of the last census for 2008/09 were obtained, they confirmed the downward trend - the share of R & D expenditures in GDP it dropped to 0.92%,and government spending on science fell by 5% in real terms (money is more important to spend on the fight for the expansion of black power), which casts serious doubt on the reality of bringing this share to 1.5% by 2014 and 2% by 2018. It is already possible to predict with a high degree of probability that the tasks set will be disrupted.

In general, the prospects for the transition to a knowledge economy in post-apartheid South Africa are becoming less optimistic. Development in this direction continues in the context of changes taking place in society, including the forced Africanization of the entire "superstructure", and it is not known whether the "difficulties of growth" will overwhelm growth itself when the inertia of the progressive movement of scientific and technological progress of the "golden age" of South African science ends, no matter how politically incorrect it sounds, which coincided with, and by and large generated by half a century of apartheid and the preceding era of "internal colonialism".

This does not mean that the author is against the ongoing process of Africanization of the economy and other spheres of activity - its unjustified acceleration leads to harmful consequences. Generally speaking, this process is inevitable after the transition of power into the hands of the black majority and, under certain conditions (careful saving of accumulated human capital, equality and improved use of resources of all groups of the population, majority and minority), progressive, but you do not need to get rid of the "chickens laying golden eggs", and this is exactly what happens. Proponents of "affirmative action"to reduce the proportion of whites in all areas, including intellectual ones, to the corresponding percentage of the total population simply moan:" the scientific staff of universities and research institutions still remain disproportionately white. " 1
1 This "vaguely reminds" those who lived in the USSR during the corresponding period of the unspoken slogan of the personnel policy of the late Brezhnev period about bringing the percentage of Jews in science, education, culture, etc.to "all-Union", i.e., to 1% of the country's population. Well, we have increased it by multiplying the "human capital" of the USA, Canada, Israel, England, France, Australia, etc. In South Africa, which is heading into the future on the wave of "black emporium", they are already beginning to notice that in recent years, more and more investments in R & D bring less and less scientific results (over a billion dollars were invested in the program for creating modular reactors, which was recently completely failed).

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In the post-apartheid period, the South African education system is undergoing modernization, eliminating the fragmentation and duplication of educational institutions and related management structures generated by the policy of separate development (everything is separate for each racial and ethnic category), but increasing the availability of education at all levels for previously discriminated groups of the population often occurs at the expense of quality. This effect is well known to every teacher: when a large number of weak students join a strong class or university group, the overall level and quality of education inevitably decreases, and the strong suffer. The consequences of racial discrimination and segregation are being vigorously addressed, but profound and effective transformation requires not only money, but also time, some cultural and psychological changes, and just basic security. The implanted Africanization, in this case in science, even financially and infrastructurally secured, has not yet been transformed into the scientific results of newcomers, so that the leaders in research and training of highly qualified personnel are still five or six leading universities that were previously intended for whites, where a "limited contingent"still plays a key role the white professorship. Although even there, for the above-mentioned reason (as well as far from the best changes in the teaching staff), the quality of training and R & D productivity are gradually decreasing. Although the integration of strong universities with weak former ethnic universities is beneficial for the latter. On the positive side, the previously oppressed and now privileged majority, which has all the doors open to it and is preferred over whites, also includes, along with Africans, people of color and Indians, who are usually better prepared and better educated, creating a talent pool for science and high-tech sectors of the economy.

The progress of the Indian community is particularly remarkable. In the nineteenth century, Indians were brought virtually as slaves (with the formal abolition of slavery) to the sugar plantations of Natal, so that they were in some respects even worse off than the blacks. Even under apartheid, they managed to "occupy heights", in terms of education and even affluence, coming close to whites (literacy among Indians is almost one hundred percent, even slightly higher than that of whites). And one of them, Mahatma Gandhi, even managed to liberate his historical homeland (not alone, of course). Now many people are leaving legally and illegally (primarily to England, where a strong Indian community ensures the transfer of "illegal immigrants"). In general, in recent years, fearing for their lives and the safety of their loved ones in the face of an unprecedented increase in crime and violence, not only qualified whites, but also fairly competent top and middle-level specialists (technicians and technologists, nurses and paramedics, and just skilled workers) with any skin color who have a chance to get a job are trying to leave to work abroad. They are quite readily accepted in England and the USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, since you don't need to learn English.

Universities have been and still are the" blacksmiths of personnel " for science in South Africa and the most important centers of fundamental and academic research. Admission to the university requires a certificate of full secondary education ("senior certificate") with grades that allow you to continue your studies at the university. For some specialties, the university may set special admission requirements. Admission to the university is made without exams, on the basis of a certificate competition, and an unspoken preference is now given to Africans, who are taken with any certificates. As a result, tens, hundreds of thousands of school dropouts become students. At the same time, academic requirements for students still remain quite high, which is why (and also because of material problems) half of Africans do not even complete their first bachelor's degree. To somehow correct the situation, many

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universities have introduced preparatory departments for 1 or even 2 years (something like the Soviet rabfak), trying to compensate for poor school preparation and make it as easy as possible for weak students to assimilate the university program.

The elimination of apartheid as discrimination against the black majority removed some obstacles in the development of the productive forces in South Africa, allowed initially to accelerate the growth rate, and partly to advance in solving a number of social problems. The growing restrictive policy in recent years against the country's five-million-strong (perhaps already four-million-strong) white minority, which is still the core of the country's scientific and technological structure, is a brake on the development of both the economy and a modern democratic society in general, which is unthinkable without effective protection of minority rights. This, simply put, is a gradual "cutting off of oxygen" for modernization and innovative transformation of the economy (the failure of a grandiose and ambitious program for creating modular reactors is an example of this).

So, to put it simply, there are fewer and fewer moral justifications for the policy of overcoming one discrimination with the help of another in today's South Africa, and the economic damage from its costs is unacceptably large and growing. By the way, the economic damage, in addition to the obvious degradation of science, education, the economy, and all state and public institutions from the forced replacement of white specialists with black half-knowns, has another aspect, which was well mentioned in the above-mentioned work of I. I. Filatov and A. B. Davidson:

"In fact, the country is now spending hundreds of billions not on accelerated development, but on artificially accelerating the creation of the black bourgeoisie - so far, alas, with minimal success, but with disastrous consequences for the country's economy" (Filatova and Davidson, 2009).

There is less and less money left for real development in the country (government spending on R & D in real terms has already fallen). This is evidenced by the failure of even the very modest goal of bringing the share of R & D expenditures in GDP to 1% by 2008 (as well as by 2009 and 2010) and the already noticeable movement in the opposite direction. So far, with some caution and in a preliminary order, it can be stated that the marked deterioration in the work of all parts of the state mechanism under the administration of Thabo Mbeki is likely to continue and is already continuing under the administration of Jacob Zuma. Following the previously unrealized ambitious plans, new ones are being adopted filled with unrealistic figures (the economic development plan until 2014, in which, in particular, it is promised to increase the share of science expenditures in GDP to 1.5%; I remember Mbeki promised to halve the half share of the poor in the country by the same time, and it is still growing faster), which execute.

In terms of the number of representatives of previously discriminated racial and ethnic groups (Africans, people of color, Indians) with university degrees required to fill vacancies in science, education and partly in the economy, South Africa is likely to reach or even exceed the desired figures by 2018, with the completion of the "innovation decade" (in science and education). But the quality of these specialists, apparently, is unlikely to reach even the previous standards of the "cursed past" era. And the small part that "makes it", most likely, if possible, will leave. As with white, the best ones will leave (they are already leaving). The latest trend of development is "down": and emigration begins to turn black.

So the transition of South Africa to a knowledge economy, with continued displacement and forced or voluntary displacement, in the face of growing insecurity, the emigration of white and non-white personnel (qualified Indians, colored people and Africans also began to leave in search of a safer living environment) and the concomitant degradation of the entire social organism, including the management superstructure, it seems increasingly problematic. Frankly

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In short, it is hardly possible due to the slow but apparently unstoppable transformation of South Africa from a developed to an underdeveloped country. I would like to hope that this will not happen, because in South Africa there is still a lot left from the "first", and not the" third " world. However, today almost the entire apparatus of power and administration in the country (with a few exceptions) is poorly competent and highly corrupt, which means, as it seems to me, that the point of no return has already passed.

Until 1994, South Africa was like a segment of the world center, placed on its geographical periphery, of course, surrounded by considerable pockets of backwardness. That is, it was the "first" world, with the exception of partly townships (for urban Africans there were already, however few and not the best, universities and modern schools, art and vocational training centers), as well as bantustans - completely. The state and the army-the police, the main industries and infrastructure, science and culture, universities and the humanitarian and technical intelligentsia-all were at or near the level (and sometimes higher) of the advanced European countries, and there are also pockets of backwardness there. Now it is mainly a developing country with still significant enclaves of "development" (almost the entire leading socio-political superstructure has already "slid down", the basis is still held in places). Thus, there is and, in fact, has already been a transition to another quality, a collapse in the lower world. An inefficiently managed country that squanders its "human capital" in a mediocre way is unlikely to be able to enter the global elite of innovative economies.

So what's in store for South Africa? If we let go of good illusions, then perhaps two scenarios are likely (one more, the other less). First, when the still existing inertia of high scientific, technical and economic development of South Africa during the apartheid era will come to naught and the constantly shrinking and shrinking contingent of white scientific and technical intellectuals and professionals in general in any field will be almost completely replaced or leave or go to another world (naturally or by hand crime), the country is no longer waiting for a slide, but a complete collapse into underdevelopment, obvious to everyone. Given the current dynamics and direction of development, this may happen quite soon, perhaps even by the very year 2018, which was conditionally outlined as the milestone of the transition to the knowledge economy. The latter (the aforementioned transition) will most likely occur "exactly the opposite", but the availability of rich natural resources and export earnings will allow some high-or medium - tech enclaves to be preserved in an underdeveloped state (mining and metallurgy "for export", for example, possibly the automotive industry, the modern communications sector) and somehow make ends meet. Unpretentious and hardworking black Mozambican miners will continue to extract gold and diamonds, chromium and platinum, coal and nickel for the local "relaxing" black capitalists and TNCs, and good revenue will allow them to give the masses bread and circuses. The leading countries of the West will be quite satisfied with this, if it is possible to continue to pump out the riches of the South African subsurface without hindrance. If not, they can do the same as with Iraq, especially since the South African army is just as degraded as the police and state apparatus. An economic catastrophe of the Zimbabwean type, generated by the "wisdom" of the leaders and the revolutionary enthusiasm of the Lumpen people, is also not excluded (it is enough to start mass confiscation of white farmers ' land, which is already being called for by the "hotheads" in the ANC). This can be a prologue to the implementation of another scenario.

The second scenario, considered, in particular, by G. V. Shubin [Shubin, 2006, p. 200-201], assumes a possible social explosion due to the disappointed expectations of almost all population groups and a sharp decline in the standard of living, which will lead to the collapse of the country (the power structures brought to almost complete incapacity are unlikely to contain serious unrest)., with allocation to an independent state

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its more developed part with a significant white and colored population. Then a certain "island of development" can be preserved in the sea of backwardness. Such a scenario seems unlikely to me yet. But everything can change as soon as it begins, and it may soon begin, a sharp decline in the standard of living of the masses. In South Africa, among other things, there are very efficient trade unions that take hundreds of thousands of angry people to the streets in the event of the slightest deterioration in the situation of workers). All the "powder kegs" that exist in interethnic relations (and there are serious problems in relations not only between whites and blacks, but also between black ethnic groups and strata, between locals and migrants, between blacks and people of color and Indians) can then explode. If this happens at the same time, the weak police will probably simply scatter, and the army will most likely remain in barracks or be divided along ethnic lines. Recent pogroms of migrants show that this is not mere speculation, but mass violence that can easily lead to anarchy and separatism.

And, of course, the language does not turn to predict the successful resolution of the existing most serious problems on the path of development of a degraded, inefficiently governed country without a radical revision of the current counterproductive course of the ruling elite. Without ending the new discrimination (favoring the incompetent with the "right" skin color over the competent with the "wrong") and returning to the noble ideals of the ANC Freedom Charter, according to which South Africa should belong to all who live in it, both black and white. Without a fundamental rejection of "affirmative action" based on the preference of one race for another.

When the policy of black preference was still moderate in the first years after apartheid, it was quite consistent with the fairly widespread humanitarian practice in developed countries, when socially vulnerable groups of the population (disabled people, single women with children, some previously discriminated ethnic groups, etc.) are granted certain quotas in enterprises and institutions (in exchange for certain benefits). other benefits for entrepreneurs), usually at the level of 5-10%, in addition to the normal recruitment of employees based on professional criteria. This does not have any serious impact on labor productivity and may even contribute to improving the social climate. When, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, under the administration of T. Mbeki, the policy of black preference became increasingly large-scale and aggressive (with the adoption of the law and the national strategy of Black Economic Empowerment in 2003), the country gradually "went haywire". When "charters" are introduced in such leading, technologically complex sectors of the economy as mining, where the depth of extraction is kilometers, requiring 40% of places to be filled by blacks, and at the top of the professional and administrative ladder, and there are simply no such number of blacks with the necessary qualifications and they take just anyone, this is already fraught with economic problems. and a technological disaster (mine accidents are already becoming more frequent).

In the fall of 2010, we received the latest news about the fate of the central, most important program in the South African government's ten - year (2008-2018) innovation plan for the transition to a knowledge society - a program that cost a lot of money and effort to create fourth-generation modular nuclear reactors (PBMR), which the country was "proud of". The program has completely failed, budget funding has been suspended, and the topic is closed. The executing company, PMBR Ltd., is being liquidated, and almost all of the company's scientists and engineers have already left for the United States, Canada, and Australia. And not the very best, the best left South Africa even earlier, which is why it was not possible to complete the program. The last remaining ones, "second class", left, but they were also in great demand in the leading countries of the world. White specialists from South Africa are appreciated everywhere, but not at home, where the "beet doctors" are in power. The Solidarnost trade Union, which consists mainly of whites, is qualified to-

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In a statement to the government and the company's management board: "Thanks to the fourth - generation modular reactor program, South Africa has returned to the nuclear map of the world. She's leaving it now. Please leave at least 25 employees of the company (over 800 have already been laid off) on permanent duty to preserve and protect advanced equipment for possible future use " [www.inet.co.za; Business Day. 17.09.2010].

Comments are unnecessary?! Still, a few words in conclusion. This "reactor fiasco" is quite fundamental, given the exceptional importance of the program. It can be considered an answer to the question of whether successful innovative development of the South African economy is possible under the existing order of things in the country. Figuratively speaking, it was the last straw that broke the camel's back - it was the last straw that broke the spine of the (overloaded and exhausted) camel of the innovative ten-year-old. The program of an innovative breakthrough in nuclear energy through the construction of small, easy-to-operate, efficient and safe modular nuclear reactors of the fourth generation 2 was the last hope, as we would say recently, of the progressive scientific community, to keep alive and capable of development the country's still relatively high scientific and technical potential. It turned out that the country is no longer capable of making a major technological breakthrough and, apparently, every year the hope for this will fade more and more. Because no one at the helm in South Africa is even going to reverse the destructive trends that are increasingly plunging the country into a swamp of degradation and backwardness.

It would be in the country's long-term interest to redirect the state's energy and resources from large-scale strengthening of black power (introducing discriminatory racial quotas and artificially "feeding" a new class of black capitalists) to really necessary reforms for society. These include, for example, the provision of public, free and high-quality education at all levels, universal health and social insurance. This would be a real help to the low-income population (i.e., primarily blacks) and would accelerate, rather than hinder, economic, scientific and technological development.

list of literature

Demkina L. A. Some aspects of socio-political development of South African society after 1994, Moscow, 2006.

Filatova I. I., Davidson A. B. What color is the "South African miracle"? The National Democratic Revolution and national relations in South Africa at the end of the XX-beginning of the XXI century / / Pax Africana. Continent and Diaspora in Search of themselves, Moscow, 2009.
Foresight. 2008. N 2 (6); 2009. N 2 (10).

Shubin G. V. problems of the development of a democratic South Africa. M., 2006.

Broad-based Black Economic Empowerment Act 53. Pretoria, 2003.

Business Day, 17.09.2010.

Innovation towards a Knowledge-based Economy // A plan for South Africa (2008 - 2018). Pretoria, 2007.

Kaplan B. Science and Technology in a Democratic South Africa. Pretoria, 2006.

National Survey of Research and Experimental Development. Pretoria, 2009/2010.

South African National Survey of Research and Experimental Development (2001 /02 - 2008/09).

www.delyagin.ru

www.earthzine.org

www.inet.co.za

2 The Chinese have already built prototypes of such reactors, by the way, with the help of South African scientists, the Americans are building them.

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