SOUTH AFRICA: White South Africans are becoming increasingly pessimistic about their country's future, according to new research.
Between 800,000 and one million whites - close to one-fifth of the apartheid-era population - have left the country in the past 10 years.
And the rate of emigration is accelerating, fuelled in large part by concerns about violent crime and the perceived negative impact of affirmative action measures, a study of the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) found.
Recent political developments are also contributing to negative attitudes, according to a separate survey of population groups in the so-called "rainbow nation".
Just 43 per cent of whites said they felt positive about South Africa and its future - a new low in the quarterly Research Surveys (RS) report. In contrast, 75 per cent of blacks, and close to 50 per cent of coloureds, Indians and Asians, said they felt positive.
RS director Neil Higgs said the increased negativity in the survey, conducted just last month, appeared to be related to rising concern over the government's HIV/Aids policy, as well as the perceived political rehabilitation of the country's former deputy-president Jacob Zuma.
"When Zuma was fired last year, white approval rose to an unprecedented level," Mr Higgs noted.
Whites are also least confident about the government's ability to successfully host the 2010 Fifa World Cup, with just 33 per cent saying they felt South Africa would be ready for the event - compared to 78 per cent of residents in the black township of Soweto.
SAIRR researcher Marco MacFarlane accused whites of partly reacting to irrational fears. He pointed out that economic growth rates were at record levels, and unemployment among whites was "infinitesimally small" - despite supposedly discriminatory affirmative action initiatives.
"The reality is that government policies are not hostile to white people," he remarked.
According to the SAIRR study, there were 4.3 million whites in South Africa last year, compared to 5.2 million in 1995. Moreover, the exodus "seems to be speeding up over time", said Mr MacFarlane.
Most of the "missing" whites were aged either 20 to 35 years, or up to 10 years, suggesting "young professionals are taking their families with them with no intention to return".
The research contradicts suggestions by groups campaigning for a reversal in South Africa's brain-drain that there has been a slowdown in white emigration.
Mr MacFarlane noted: "Unless the African population becomes very skilled very quickly, there will be instability in the economy."