An Aesop fable with a dystopian ending?

One of the jokes doing the rounds immediately after President Cyril Ramaphosa delivered his state of the nation address (Sona) on Thursday night was that Tintswalo had missed all the fuss about her on national television due to load-shedding.

Tintswalo, the fictional character created by the president and his speechwriters to tell the tale of “democracy’s child ”— a young woman born in 1994 who benefited from various policies introduced by successive ANC administrations — has dominated much of the conversation about Sona.

From a talkability point of view, the device was a stroke of genius on the Presidency’s part — even though it must have been obvious even to the story’s creators that it would not be universally welcome.

Predictably, the opposition rubbished the Tintswalo story, with FF+ leader Pieter Groenewald saying “it is quite clear” that the president is “totally out of touch with the realities of South Africa”.

John Steenhuisen, the DA leader and a man who hopes to oust Ramaphosa from office through the newly formed multiparty charter, complained of “glaring omissions” in the Tintswalo story.

ActionSA’s Athol Trollip told EWN’s Tshidi Madia that Tintswalo could not possibly have been from the rural Eastern Cape because, if she was, she would have had no school transport or running water and would probably not have studied beyond high school.

They were not alone; sections of the public were searing in their criticism — some even referencing their own life stories to disprove Tintswalo’s supposed experience of democracy.

Yet there are many others who could fully or partially identify with the story. If they did not see themselves in Ramaphosa’s Tintswalo, they saw their younger siblings or other people they had grown up with. I thought justice minister Ronald Lamola disarmed one of his interviewers outside the Cape Town City Hall soon after the president spoke when he explained why he saw himself in the story.

He grew up on a farm, a child of farm labourers, he explained. They were poor at home and without the government’s national student financial aid scheme it is unlikely he would have made it through university, where he studied law.

There were many similar testimonies from Joe Public, most told from the perspective of working-class families who had not dreamed of having a university graduate in their midst before the democratic transition.

But even among these beneficiaries of government policies, there were serious concerns that the path the country is taking is unlikely to produce enough Tintswalos of the future.

While they appreciate what government policies would have done for Tintswalo, too many of her cousins and peers have fallen through the cracks — swelling the evergrowing army of the unemployed with no bright future.

The South African struggle for liberation was always more than being about the right to vote or to sit on the same public bench as other racial groups. It was about economic justice, access to opportunities and an improved standard of living.

That is why in the first decade of formal apartheid, the most popular struggles were those waged over better wages, high bus fares and high rent. Asinamali — we have no money — is a slogan that became almost as popular as azikhwelwa — we are not riding — as the Alexandra bus boycott of the late 1950s was dubbed.

Asinamali was also a rallying cry for members of the South African Council of Trade Unions as they launched their “a pound a day” campaign that led to many strikes in the then Transvaal and Natal in 1957 and 1958.

Asinamali was also to become a call to action for the residents of Lamontville township in Durban around 1983 as community leader Msizi Dube led them into a rent boycott.

In all of these struggles, and many others, political oppression was seen as the root cause of economic suffering. Freedom, therefore, promised a world where such suffering would end — where one’s skin colour would not determine one’s social class or economic fate.

For the majority, however, the past 30 years have not lived up to that promise. In the early years there was impatience with the pace of change, but there was always that belief that things were changing for the better and that, in time, the promised land would be reached.

However, over the past decade or so, South Africans have watched in despair as many of the gains were reversed and eroded by corruption. The hope of 1994, of striving towards a better life for all, is increasingly being replaced by the fear that the country is turning into a stereotypical postcolonial dystopia.

Parents continue to send their Tintswalos to school, encourage them to get good grades so they can make it to university. Those who qualify are grateful that their little Tintswalos are able to access higher education, thanks to NSFAS — no matter how imperfect it may be. But even with all of that, they still live with the pain of knowing that

— even with that university degree — their Tintswalo may never ever find a job or funding to start her own business.