South African Coalition - Politics, laws, structure

[Icelander]

I've been reading the old Transhuman Space book I had and the number of PDFs I've purchased since my friend decided to run a cyberpunk game, but lacked a setting*, and I suggested setting it in a free city in a developing country in the THS, one with an unusually weak government and strong, unscrupulous transnational corporations using it as a base for various shenanigans that would not be allowed elsewhere on Earth.

My friend spent time in Dar es Salaam as a child and it seems to me that the city is an excellent fit, with free city status easily explained due to the in-setting political fragmentation of Tanzania. Dar es Salaam as a free city in mainland Tanganyika that has close ties with Zanzibar is, frankly, no less implausible than a Dar es Salaam politically and culturally cut off from Zanzibar.

In order to detail our new free city, though, we find that we need more information on how the South African Coalition actually works.

What I have found on my rapid read-through so far is that it's a cooperative to assist the development of Sub-Saharan African countries, historically led by South Africa. It has a Committee which governs whatever policy falls under the auspices of the SAC and there is a perception, in Kenya, at least, that being part of the SAC entails giving up national sovereignity.

The member nations do have local governments, however, including at least a head of state for all of them and a Finance Minister in Kenya. This implies that they have at least partial sovereignity or at least home rule, with some degree of independent fiscal policy.

I'm hoping some experts of the THS world will have more detail for me. I'd appreciate it if anyone could point me to a source which has more detail on the SAC or individual countries in it than the base Transhuman Space book, Fifth Wave or Broken Dreams.

1) How inter-connected is the economy of the SAC?

Member nations range from Dead Broke to Wealthy, so it's unlikely that it has anything resembling the Four Freedoms of the modern EU, as otherwise the teeming poor of the underprivileged SAC nations would flock to the economies of the successful ones.

On the other hand, it's not much of a cooperative for the development of the region if the richer nations do not provide any assistance to the poorer ones. So, what form does this assistance take?

2) What laws govern immigration, work visas and guest workers between SAC nations?

What benefits, if any, does Tanganyikan citizenship offer for someone who is trying to find work in a richer SAC country, like Botswana, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa or Zimbabwe?

*He had an adventure and wanted to use megacorps from a collectable card game, but needed detail on the world as a whole.

[Icelander]

3) Are there any laws which all member nations of the South African Coalition commit themselves to enforcing by joining?

One example would be that bioroids are apparently accorded the rights of citizens throughout the SAC. This is unlikely to result from a coincidence and most likely suggests either a formal agreement between all member nations or a very effective system of diplomatic pressure and memetic influence by South Africa on all other members.

What about the law mentioned in Broken Dreams as applying in Kenya, i.e. that if there is a human* able and willing to do a job, it's illegal to have that job done by remote-operated cybershell or by informorph. Are there such laws in other SAC countries?

*The term is not defined, so it's unclear if that means any biological citizen of a SAC country, any biological citizen of Kenya or a more restrictive biological category, such as only those with a certain percentage of human DNA or perhaps only baseline humans.

[Icelander]

4) Does anyone know what factors so sharply limit the economic development of those nations in the SAC which remain Poor or Dead Broke?

For recently joined nations, the answer is often obvious. Uganda is still Poor despite Good stability because they only joined the SAC in 2099. Before that, they probably had limited access to the kind of close trade ties, economic cooperation and good credit lines that would have enabled them to catch up with emerging Third Wave nations.

On the other hand, nations that have been a part of the SAC for a long time and had a stable government for decades, but still don't exhibit economic growth enough to lift them out of Dead Broke or Poor, may have other problems that are not discussed in the primary text. I'm really curious as to what these might be, especially for countries which are close enough to our free city of Dar es Salaam to matter enormously in our campaign (Mozambique, Tanganyika, etc.).

5) When did Tanganyika, for example, join the South African Coalition?

They are mentioned as having a stable government from the 2060s/2070s and as being a staunch member of the SAC, but still have only a Dead Broke economy. Granted, they are not one of the 20 poorest countries in the world*, but the economy still compares unfavourably with places like Burundi (plagued by corruption and internal violence, heading for yet another civil war in 2100), Nigeria (plagued by ethnic tensions and internal violence, heading for a civil war in 2100) or Cambodia (ruled by a brutal and corrupt dictatorship). This despite Tanganyika's Good stability, which is better than Average Wealth SAC members Botswana and Zimbabwe.

6) What is it specifically that keeps Tanganyika (Dead Poor) and Mozambique (Poor) from catching up to other SAC members economically or even just improving to Poor and Struggling?

It's not lack of Stability (Good, in both cases) and the text even mentions Mozambique as advancing rapidly economically, but evidently, both nations have serious problems that are not plaguing Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, Swaziland or Zimbabwe.

Of course, maybe the high CR in Tanganyika is keeping economic growth nil. Or the civil wars of the 20s and 30s ruined so much infrastructure that it's just being fixed now, two generations later. Maybe the balkanised states that lasted into the 70s actually fought against each other during that time, meaning that until a generation ago, Tanganyika had been at internal war for more than half a century and there was no infrastructure at all.

Maybe the 2021 hantavirus outbreak that decimated Dar es Salaam wasn't the only large-scale biotech accident in Tanganyika's history and the remnants of various super-insects and malfunctioning farm bioswarms make clean-up extremely expensive and ensure that the acricultural sector is a lot less productive than it should be. Maybe the wars between the balkanised states released a lot of bioweapons that remain dangerous.

Or maybe there is a very charismatic and popular dictator, ruling over a stable government, who nonetheless manages to remain popular enough for no protests to emerge while his kleptocratic policies make him one of the richest men in the world.

As for Mozambique, I suspect that it is at the very edge of Poor Wealth, almost having made it to Struggling by now.

What do forumites think?

---

I've read through the base Transhuman Space book, Broken Dreams and Fifth Wave, but I don't own all THS books yet. In particular, there might be a mention of something in an adventure or an author might have commented on mailing lists. I'm also interested in forumite opinions and theories for all of these questions.

*Economies bad enough to round down to Dead Broke characterise 30-50 countries in THS, depending if we're counting micronations, and the combined population of these countries is around 1.4 billion people.

[Icelander]

Does the South Africa Coalition in THS have any historical links with the real-world Southern African Development Community and/or the Southern African Customs Union?

[Phil Masters]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Does the South Africa Coalition in THS have any historical links with the real-world Southern African Development Community and/or the Southern African Customs Union?

Not mentioned in the text that I recall. I'm not sure that anyone ever really developed the SAC in any detail, beyond the idea that it's a formalisation of South African hegemony in the continent, which in turn arises from South African economic success, and the dominance of South African biotech corporations following their development of an AIDS cure in 201<mumble>.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

Not mentioned in the text that I recall. I'm not sure that anyone ever really developed the SAC in any detail, beyond the idea that it's a formalisation of South African hegemony in the continent, which in turn arises from South African economic success,

Setting a game in a a free city located in Tanganyika, a South Africa Coalition country, demands that the GM establish a lot of these details for his campaign. As more knowledgable about THS than he is* and the owner of more books on the setting, I've been deputised to world-building duties, at least so far as the world at large impinges on the free city of Dar es Salaam.

So far, immigration law and bioroid rights are of special interest, as our characters are involved in saving bioroids from sex slavery, protracted death by toxic waste or similar terrible situations. As the SAC accords citizen rights to bioroids, we immediately thought of being involved with smuggling them across the border into Tanganyika.

We really wanted to be connected to the al-Mu'aqqibat underground railroad, which seemed to us from reading the books likely to be involved in helping bioroids get to the SAC, as well as the southern parts of France. The Islamic Caliphate is vast and parts of it are much closer to Tanganyika or Kenya than the EU.

Of course, the extreme poverty of Tanganyika means that they'd probably need to get to another SAC country from there, one rich enough so that it's at least conceivable for it to accept immigrants that will require social assistance and/or jobs. It was in connection to that we were wondering about immigration, citizenship laws, work permits and the situation with borders between SAC countries generally.

As Line Editor, do you have any insights?

We fully plan to assume what we find plausible, as well as what fits our desired campaign frame, but if we can do so without doing violence with the setting as envisioned by the Line Editor, that would be ideal.

*He had never heard about the setting before starting campaign planning.

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

and the dominance of South African biotech corporations following their development of an AIDS cure in 201<mumble>.

I accept that Transhuman Space is a future set in an alternate timeline. So far, I've been working off the theory that the timelines are identical until now unless that would make something that is directly specified otherwise in the book impossible or illogical enough to break suspension of disbelief.

Obviously, that applies for historical events in THS which didn't happen in our world. I've also applied it to China's far greater interest and investment in space technology that could be used in colonising Mars all the way back before the year 2000 in the THS world.

Sub-Saharan Africa bio-tech firms are another, interesting difference between the timelines. This, of course, has particular impact on our game, as Dar es Salaam was decimated in 2021 by hantavirus accidentally released from a bioresearch facility. That will probably turn out to be a fairly big deal in our background history of the city. Obviously, as Ithemba is still in business, it wasn't them, but we haven't established anything in our setting about the exact details. Any thoughts?

We want Dar es Salaam to have been a booming local hub before that, as it is in our 2010s, but after the accident, we were thinking it might have been almost abandoned for a long while. The background history we've been throwing around to justify cyberpunk tropes in a THS city, even at 2100, would be substantially helped by having parts of the city having been almost empty until the 2070s, with lots of empty office buildings there that were then resettled by economic refugees* looking for jobs as the harbour area started to come together again.

*Maybe aided by a last spasm of fighting as mainland Tanganyika was finally reunified after the balkanisation that the civil war brought on.

[ldj00]

Hello,

I am hoping you do not mind me giving my opinion?

I would say that the virus put so much burden on the governmental infrastructure, that it collapsed, and a few corporations stepped up and said they would handle a subset of the public services, if the laws and regulations where modified to help them remain profitable while keeping the city from becoming a ghost town.

Then you have a few corporations that are in charge of different aspects. I could see a security firm standing as the police/defense forces, another one or two corporations taking over healthcare (hospitals, ambulances, clinics, etc), and so on.

Of course, all regulations and restrictions were removed, which means the pharmaceutical and/or biotech companies can test new drugs, surgeries, etc on patients without any malpractice or other negatives.

I am sure to help finance this, some bank was made the preferred banking institute and all that entails.

Now you have no government, or so little government that has no power over the corporations. This allows the corporation to basically do what they want. They might have declared only corporations are citizens, while people are just dwellers there, not citizens. The corporations would offer some protections for their employees, but everyone else would be a second class citizen. That would give it a very cyberpunk feel.

In such an environment, where corporations are trying to extract all the money they can, with access fees, processing fees, and such, a rampant black market, robbery, crime, etc would grow quickly outside the corporation gated housing projects.

I could also see those coming from the Caliphate who were seeking something not readily available there, or the smuggling to the Caliphate from Dar es Salaam and the tension between the Caliphate and the SAC.

Seems like it would make a very interesting cyberpunk type setting.

I know this is several months later, and may not be helpful, but I am working on my own THS game, preparing to run, and trying to work up some details on where and what is available there.

[vicky_molokh]

Some of the things mentioned sound over the top even for Broken Dreams.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Some of the things mentioned sound over the top even for Broken Dreams.

Which, in particular?

1.4 billion people in THS canonically live in countries where the GURPS Wealth level rounds down to Dead Broke. In the real world, countries with such utterly failed economies are usually wartorn hell holes where civil war has been going on for decades or operate under some equally other terrible conditions that make it impossible for even basic economic development to occur.

I can't imagine many ways for a functioning society to remain at that level for long. If the average Wealth level somewhere is Dead Broke, it's because something is very, very wrong on many levels. When this thread was posted, I was looking for ideas on what that could be, in the specific countries which belonged to the SAC, but were still failed states, or close to it, economically.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Which, in particular?

"Only corporations are citizens, people are not citizens" does not seem like something out of post-cyberpunk genre-wise, as is much of the rest of the high-end corp-related stuff.