Whenever I spend time in Butterworth, I lament in disbelief at the extent of my hometown’s fall from grace. It is a debilitated wreck compared to what it was in the 1980s, when it was a small but thriving industrial town in the middle of rural Transkei.

Butterworth, now part of the Eastern Cape, deindustrialised after 1994 when investors pulled out, and so a decline in the town’s infrastructure began. The slide into a state of despair was accelerated by corruption, incompetence, mismanagement and political infighting involving various competing ANC factions in the province...

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