I can't believe the people in charge of the west actually thought SA would turn into this feel good story. I know that they are dumb but there's no way they could be that stupid. They will have to figure out a way to quell this and quell it fast. The more people that get their eyes on this the worse for them. You realize now it's South Africa, but what about 15 years from now? What about 30? Is this Americas crystal ball?
There may have been some hope that South Africa would turn out like a "normal" third world nation; albeit I think noone was under the delusion that there wouldn't be a drop in quality of life, or something similar.
The problem with Africa, and I'll go with referencing the left wing over here, is that the "revolutionaries" were not organized, were lazy, opportunistic, kleptocratic, ultra recalcitrant, and had basically no realistic future plans for anything. It didnt help that most of these movements may have had semi-legitimate grievances that they didn't fully understand (ie, "why can't we vote? >because you have the education of a 1st grader at best. "raciss white"), and we're just funded by the Chinese or Russians who just threw money at them for the purpose of destabilizing the West and didn't really give much of a fuck about the aftermath.
Look at Che in the congo for a second, even he realized how fucking batshit stupid these "revolutionaries" were.
Now, I'm not saying that revolutions in Latin America or the rest of the world turn out much better, but at least when they manage to overthrow their states, there tends to be a somewhat greater degree of order with a caudillo in charge who at least attempts to keep societal order somewhat relative to what the previous junta maintained (which is ironic, because almost all of the Latin American revolutionaries just become carbon copies of the strongmen they overthrew a few years later), rather than just some kleptocrat shit.
I think people hoped that South Africa would turn out the same way as Brazil with the end of their dictatorship. Poverty was predictable, there would always be favelas, but at least keep the business sectors of the nation clean and contained and hose the hoodrats out of their shacks when the Olympics come to town.
The hope was perhaps that the ANC or any other government would at least have some shit together, be able to actually run a state at some basic level, etc. Instead, the water and electricity was almost immediately gone, everyone was left to fend for themselves, corruption and police inability to intervene was so rampant people just started relying on private companies, and that was the start of this all. The revolutionaries were charlatans who basically took the money, enriched themselves, and ran (kind of like the BLM Marxists who took donation money to buy multiple mansions, in a "history repeats itself way" amusingly- imagine if they became the heads of state, and thats a pretty accurate description of what happened in ZA).
The thing that none of these people want to admit is the fact that some of their grievances, while they do identify some ugly things, are not legitimate grievances. You do need some basic level of order. Just because there are historic grievances, doesn't give people license to loot or rob at their diction. Some level of inequality is pretty justified and frankly necessary, You should be somewhat discriminatory in who you let into your gated neighborhood, let alone inner business circles- you don't want these savannah ghouls literally shitting in elevators in your city centers, let alone business centers, right? But, these are ugly truths that these "revolutionaries" just didn't want to address because it would be difficult.
Its always TLDR, but- I think most people hoped that ZA would just turn out like a typical post-junta state elsewhere in the world, once a junta loses power and "revolutionaries" come into power and have surface level changes, but actually enforce pretty much the same old rules of law within the nation, because turns out a lot of what the previous regime was doing actually made some sense, and ZA did none of this.