Between hope and despair

Tomorrow South Africans will commemorate 30 years since our country was reborn as a democracy after centuries of colonialism and apartheid. Undoubtedly, April 27 2024 will stir up mixed emotions — predominantly of despair and hope.

Thirty years ago on Saturday, weary of internecine conflict, millions of South Africans voted in the first all-race elections. Through their vote they chose a future of peaceful coexistence and constitutional democracy.

This newspaper takes its hat off to all South Africans who voted on that day to bring our country back from the brink of a protracted and apocalyptic bloody conflict. Together we created the best human story of the 20th century.

Three decades on, there is much to celebrate about our young democracy. Our multiparty political system is strong and vibrant. In three decades we have not missed or even postponed an election. Two presidents — Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma — left office prematurely without a single bullet being fired. Our jails do not contain political prisoners or prisoners of conscience.

The democracy-supporting bodies envisioned in chapter 9 of our constitution, as well as the judiciary, civil society and the brave but fragile media, are all still standing. The reconciliation project, Nelson Mandela’s flagship legacy, survives, though it is under growing threat from many fronts. As inadequate as they may be, public services — healthcare, education, social welfare, electricity supplies and piped water to households — have been extended to the majority of South Africans. SA even has two new universities — a healthy sign — and fee-free higher education for students from poor homes has been introduced, albeit clumsily. SA’s relative social stability despite its many challenges is owed, in the main, to the

government’s expansion of social protection, which has helped avert a humanitarian disaster of hunger and starvation and contain civil unrest. Nearly 20-million South Africans live off one social grant or another, and a basic income grant is seemingly on the way.

The ANC, which has dominated the national political scene for all of the years of democracy, has to be credited for some basic aspects of its management of the economy. Its leaders from Mandela to Cyril Ramaphosa have resisted the temptation to which other postcolonial African governments succumbed of the wholesale nationalisation of mines, banks and industries.

The SA Reserve Bank has remained independent despite successive ANC conference resolutions demanding its nationalisation. As well as the Bank’s independence, SA’s chaotic finances of 30 years ago were patched up largely by two factors a wellresourced National Treasury and sound finance ministers who enjoyed political protection from serving presidents, especially Mandela, Mbeki, briefly Kgalema Motlanthe and Ramaphosa.

It is true that Zuma, who served as president for nine years, threatened to scupper the constitutionally guaranteed independence of the Treasury. He tried twice, first to force it to fund an unaffordable nuclear energy programme and then to take its budgeting powers into his presidency.

All of the above said, it is also true that SA is looking and feeling less steady at 30 than was promised by the heady early years of democracy. Times are undeniably hard, and many South Africans understandably despair about their circumstances and the future.

Our economy has underperformed in the past 20 years. Unemployment, especially of black youths, is unsustainably high, as are poverty and inequality. Public debt is too high, which has forced the country to dip into its reserves to help stabilise its finances. The economy, which has grown slower than the population has expanded, is expected to grow by less than 1% this year.

The state-owned and state-managed energy, transport and freight logistics services have been collapsing. In desperation, an anti-business government has reluctantly turned to the private sector for help to revive these economic services, including tackling crime and corruption. The jury is out on whether this social pact will succeed, but it is a source of hope.

Part of the recovery process is facing up to the reality that we are a failing state, and perilously close to becoming a failed one. Some state-owned companies have gone on for months without paying salaries, driving some employees to suicide. Race relations are precarious, stoked by opportunistic populists. Racebased parties are more popular than ever in the build-up to May’s elections.

There is hope. But hope is not a strategy. It is an ingredient to one. Critically, the political space has become competitive. The ANC’s dominance has become challengeable, which will hopefully inject some humility. On May 29 South Africans have a chance to elect a government that understands the pain they experience from lawlessness and disorder, crime and corruption, and the indignity of unemployment and poverty.

As with 1994, necessary change will not come about on its own. It will have to be birthed. Maintaining hope that the next 30 years can be manifestly better than the last is a start. The second step is deciding to do something about it.

As in 1994, the realisation that we are in this together ought to drive us towards putting our shoulders to the wheel in constructing the next 30 years.