Fascinating you say "a country that is in steady decline" when all the data of the past 29 years since the start of democracy seems to go against that statement. I hate the ANC for their corruption and other stances, but I don't let party political hate get in the way of the real basis of what is going on in the country. I'm guessing you haven't spent much time there? Whereas I have spent the past 25 years and travelled and lived extensively in South Africa.

What is your indication of decline? Some facts and figures:

- Less than 30% of the population having access to water has increased to near 100%.

- Electricity had less than 30% access and now sits around 90%

- Access to education (The matric pass rate more than doubled from 53.4 in 1995 to 82.9 in 2023) to taking that to near 100% in 29 years is pretty incredible.

- Taking 8 million people out of poverty and lower class into the middle class in that time is pretty great.

- Access to free healthcare for the entire country.

- The freedom of not being discriminated towards due to skin colour.

Yes the ANC has had an opportunity to do much greater good, but if you take in the bigger picture and understand that the white population still holds over 70% of the wealth while being 10% of the population - this is an enforced inequality that needs to be righted.

If you look at the freedoms of South Africa, it has possibly the best constitution in the world. Sure, the enforcement of the laws are not as good as the laws themselves - but the rate of improvement in my lifetime has been staggering. Even despite the setback of the Zuma years.

Even now, we have gone from an ANC dominated political landscape to a Government of National Unity, which forces different political factions to work together. Another huge milestone in the burgeoning democracy of a young country.

It is so far from perfect but if you really have spent any significant time in SA and still think it is a country in decline, then I am more inclined to think you're one of the types of expats who love to shit on something that you have no bond to, and not because your arguments are bound by facts. We must interrogate the long standing consequences of white monopoly capitals violent subjugation of South Africans in both the past and the present to paint a fair picture of the country.

Your quote " a country that is in steady decline." certainly does not paint a fair picture.

FWIW, I moved to a European country about 20 years ago. The first 10 years I thought everything was fine, but once I was applying for something, they said that it seemed like I never actually properly entered the system, but had just began. Most public services worked alright regardless. Cue some confusion for a while, and some filled forms later, and I finally got legally approved and finalized to actually stay, ten years after I initially arrived.

Bureaucracy can be crazy at times, and sometimes it seems like data just gets lost, for whatever reason.

Do you know why the British authorities wanted a birth certificate? Did his ZA passport show date and place of birth? Did the ZA birth certificate have some other information that the British authorities specifically wanted, like the names of the parents? Or were the authorities just following some standard procedure with no obvious purpose?

By what metric is it in "steady decline"? As as South African, it's amusing to see how my country is generalised.

What is ZA? Zambia?

My dad was born in the Philippines in 1939. He came over to the U.S. on a Taiwanese passport in 1959, part of a group of students that MIT imported from the Philippines based on letters of recommendation from their Atomic Energy Commission, and then bounced around on various visas for a decade. Finally got citizenship upon marrying my mom in 1971.

When McCain was running for president, there was a big court case about whether being born in the Canal Zone (a U.S. territory) qualified as being a "natural born citizen". And I made the connection - "Wait. The Philippines was a U.S. territory in 1939. Shouldn't dad have had birthright citizenship?"

Moot point by then, he'd already been a citizen for ~40 years, and died the next year. But it was wild to think that the 10+ years of immigration hassles were basically due to an administrative fuck-up, and that legally, he should have had citizenship all along. The process you link wouldn't work for him, either, because the Philippines is not a U.S. territory now.

The Amish have a social security exemption.

So does South Africa. However, capable administrators are severely lacking.

Before segregation ended, it was relatively common for hospitals to turn away pregnant black women, ultimately forcing them to use midwives instead. Those born via midwives often were not issued birth certificates, so many black Americans have none.

Consequently, that's also why Republicans push so hard for voter ID laws.

> South Africans coming forward are being treated with suspicion that they are an illegal immigrant

I can't help but wonder if similar concerns will appear in the US, if they haven't already.

Isn't there a similar mechanism but for the case where you lost ALL of your documents e.g. in a house fire.

IIRC, you need a couple of people to sign affidavits that affirm you are who you say you are. That's the start of the "paper trail" and then you start rebuilding your document pool.

Getting married and changing your last name is similar (although with fewer documents etc).

Some members of my family have no record of birth or formal existence until they were quite old.

Obligations on parents to generate that paper trail exist now but there are still many ways people can fall into the cracks. The US has generally been far more accommodating of Americans without documentation out of necessity than I think people realize. Some parents choose this for their children, either intentionally or through negligence, and those children need a way to bootstrap their documentation as adults.

There was a large contingent of Americans born outside the US to American parents in the aftermath of WW2 that frequently had little or no documentation.

1955 was 70 years ago, it doesn’t seem that surprising.

For now. I'm not being snarky or hyperbolic. Today's Daily pod is related. I'm half way through and no mention of voting yet, but it takes no imagination to see where this is going. Remember the whole "Obama wasn't a citizen" thing? Remember the "illegal aliens elected Joe Biden?" The best way to disenfranchise a segment of the population is to give them difficulty proving they are citizens, so they cannot vote.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/21/podcasts/trump-civil-righ...

The guest of this pod is the creator of the 1619 project and she is against DEI.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1619_Project

Yea not birth certificates from the hospital, but there is documentation. Well, there was for awhile. My grandpa definitely didn't have a birth certificate back in the 1930s (or 1920s? lol) in Taishan, but also no docs of any sort whatsoever..

But my MIL from Mao era has docs from the local officials that's all notarized, as does my wife. The dates might be... you know, not exactly right, but they're close, and importantly they're accepted by both the Chinese government and also other foreign governments for official purposes (immigration, etc).

I think I the article here we're talking about something fundamentally different from the last 70-ish in China. They're talking about people with like no official docs whatsoever, can't get healthcare, national ID card, anything. Very different from China 70 years ago, and very different from even pre civil war China.

Native South African is a debatable word. You could argue that the Khoisan are the natives. But I doubt these are the affected populations that are the subject of this article. There were multiple migrations into South Africa, some from the south by the Europeans and some from the north by the Bantu. All around a 200-year primary window. Even today, the northern migration routes are still active.

This is why crypto has so much potential, to give them access to a form of digital money.

Feels excessive. Keeping South Africans out of our economy feels like closing the barn door after the cows have left.

KYC/AML is largely there to increase profits for corrupt politicians and bankers at the expense of the honest segment of poor. Criminals and the dishonest can bypass that stuff easily enough through corruption if they are large, and by slipping through the cracks with "dark" IDs if they are small.

The Church had some parallels to the state in the olden days, in that it was the primary system of social support and welfare.

Identification and segregation is an important element of any welfare system, to prevent the system being destroyed by an unlimited amount of persons drawing aid while only a relatively fixed small pool provide the aid.

The state in the more liberal countries did not usually introduce such measures to make it difficult to live there without ID until the state had pretty much fully taken over the prior job of the church (or family) to provide to the unemployed, sick elderly, etc.

On a smaller scale, imagine back in certain periods of the old days, when families were the main method of social security. If you could not identify who was your own brother or mother, you would constantly being scammed (or even not scammed, just overwhelmed) until you were broke or the system broke.

I don't have any answer how to roll back the nationalistic identification and Orwellian immigration systems without decoupling social benefits from citizenship/residency, or from becoming so incredibly wealthy you just don't care.