Celebrate and protect SA’S hard-earned freedom
After all the noise, after all the friction and insults of electioneering, remember this: South Africans are beautiful.
And we will be even more beautiful, strong, boisterous, resilient, perhaps even more prosperous, after this election.
In the first half of June our respected chief justice, Raymond Zondo, will convene a sitting of the National Assembly.
Our elected representatives, some new and some old, some young and some ready for retirement, or even beyond retirement age, will elect a speaker, and then a president.
That president, whether it is President Cyril Ramaphosa or someone else, will then form a cabinet that will run our affairs for the next five years.
It will be our cabinet, not one appointed by the Gupta family from their Saxonwold compound.
After the announcement of the cabinet, we will criticise the new appointees.
We will point out anomalies in their histories, their strengths, their failures, their hopes and dreams and plans.
Then they will knuckle down to their work.
For praising or criticising the president’s choices, no opposition leader or journalist or analyst will be visited by the secret police at night. No-one will be jailed.
We will argue, even fight, and continue with our work. Why? Because we are an open democracy, a free society in which opposition parties, NGOS, journalists and activists have full rights to speak truth to power.
This is something many of our friends — particularly in the Brics group of countries — do not have.
This may very well be one of the freest countries in the world. We should celebrate and protect this freedom.
The May 29 election is part of the protection of that freedom.
The past five years have been horrendous in many respects.
Remember the pandemic of 2020 and the resultant shutdowns?
Yet, with many of us losing livelihoods and loved ones, South Africans rallied together and held the country together.
Ramaphosa, for all his faults, led the country calmly and admirably through a global pandemic, emerging as one of the key international leaders in fashioning a response to the Covid-19 virus.
It was in July 2021 that our beauty, our ubuntu, came through.
When those who wish to destroy our country went on the rampage in the name of Jacob Zuma, and destroyed property and killed 354 people, it was ordinary South Africans across the country who stopped the mayhem.
The police, the state, was nowhere to be found.
Ordinary people looked around them and refused to join the anarchy. They defeated the monsters of evil.
These are true South Africans. These are our heroes.
These are the people we should be looking to as we travel into the next 30 years of our democracy.
Our country can be immensely successful in the next five years. When Ramaphosa came to power in 2018, he promised to restore many captured institutions of accountability and of governance to their former glory.
Remember how the National Prosecuting Authority, the SA Revenue Service, the Hawks, and others, were run by partisan leaders appointed merely to sit on cases that involved the powerful in the ANC?
Well, some of those institutions have been fixed or are on their way to recovery.
The judiciary is respected across the board, even by those who claim, for populist reasons, that it is captured.
The discredited former Public Protector has been impeached.
With these revived institutions, the administration that takes over in the next few weeks can build on the successes of the past six years and give us an even stronger, better, more humane, more agile, and responsive, SA.
We could be on the brink of something good here if we don’t fall prey to the idolisation of populists and cult leaders.
We need serious people — of the old parties and the newest — to take us to real growth and prosperity.
Over the past five years, government and business leaders have collaborated extensively to deal with some of the big crises we have faced.
Business has contributed expertise and resources to Eskom, Transnet and other entities to get the power back on and to get trains running again.
Whichever party wins these elections must learn that there is no upside in throwing the baby out with the bath water.
This government-business collaboration can do wonders for confidence in our country and for making things work here.
We should not just keep this relationship; we should nurture it.
These are our most uncertain elections in 30 years.
We don’t know what lies in wait for us on the other side of May 29.
Yet, we know that we have triumphed over adversity before and built this incredible, beautiful, peaceful, country — warts and all.
We know our people want it to work for themselves and for their children’s children.
We’ll be fine. We might even be very fine.