Broke, troubled, but full of hope
In 1994 our fair Republic was young, broke and troubled, yet full of enthusiasm and hope for the future and raring to go — a bit like the writer, actually.
A nation was being built from scratch from the rubble of 300 years of colonialism, division and apartheid rule: a daunting but exhilarating task for Nelson Mandela and his first cabinet — and the rest of us.
I was starting a family, heading back to journalism and sorting my life out, a project which, like our democracy, has had varying levels of success ever since.
Back then I had hair and Durban’s beaches were swimmable — or at least for the 13% of the population that was white enough to be allowed to enjoy the Golden Mile while the rest looked on, or cleaned up after them.
South Africa had 24/7 electricity and streets with no potholes — or at least part of it did — the same part which also had running water, flushing toilets, access to social welfare and healthcare, and the right to vote, up until 1994.
Mzansi also had the Group
Areas Act, the Suppression of Communism Act, the Internal Security Act and the Immorality
Act, along with the Natives (Urban Areas) Act and the Representation of Blacks Act.
Not a lot of fun and thankfully gone — along with the regime that wrote them — banished to the history books as a reminder of where we come from.
The decade that followed was a thing of beauty.
No more police state, slegs blankes and army of occupation in the townships.
Houses, roads and schools where none previously existed; one education
system; one civil service; a single welfare system — and a national football team that occasionally won tournaments.
No more sanctions, international isolation and pariah status; a return to the United Nations — and planet Earth, actually; an end to detention without trial and the abolition of the death penalty.
We started well, surprised the rest of the world — and ourselves — for quite some time, but then lost it, badly, as it turns out.
So did the ANC, which flourished during the Mandela and Thabo Mbeki years, taking a two-thirds majority at the height of its powers, and then lost its way, along with the country — and myself — for a decade and a bit.
Thirty years on and Mandela is gone; the only democratically elected president to finish his term and actually retire rather than being fired by his own party.
The ANC recalled Mbeki — now one of the current party leadership’s fiercest critics — and then went on to remove Jacob Zuma — one of the party’s greatest embarrassments.
It will in all likelihood do the same to Cyril Ramaphosa once his second term as party president is up, unless the voters remove him and the ANC from office next year.
The party they led — and which
Ramaphosa still leads — remains in government, but may lose its majority for the first time since 1994, when South Africans go to vote next year.
If it does, it will mainly be because of its own excesses and failures, an outcome which the ANC, in its present form, richly deserves.
It is hard to recognise the party as the one that came to power in 1994 — or even the one that replaced Mandela with Mbeki — mainly because it isn’t.
Thirty years of cronyism, corruption and complacency will do that.
So will nine years with Zuma at the helm: almost a decade of looting, gutting and political and financial mayhem that we — and the ANC — are still battling to recover from, and may never get out from under.
ubaba broke the country, and the ANC, during his two terms of office; Ramaphosa has failed to fix it.
The five years of undiminished looting, millions in the sofa and governance by committee that have followed since Zuma’s recall are not what Ramaphosa promised, despite the brief period of promise between 2018 and the Covid-19 outbreak.
The Covid-19 years brought out the best in South Africans — and the worst in our leaders, who happily looted the billions aimed at keeping people alive through the worst pandemic in recent memory while making up regulations to keep us home for as long as possible as they went along.
Ramaphosa’s promise of a new dawn — and the goodwill he had received from South Africans — burned away like the morning mist in the fire of his comrades’ greed — and his own unwillingness to take a stand against them.
It’s been more of the same ever since.
Thirty years of poor decisions, bad behaviour and even worse leadership later and we’re pretty much taken back to where we were — economically speaking, at the very least.
Thirty years on and Mzansi and I are both older, but not necessarily wiser — and certainly a lot worse for wear.
We’re both still broke — predominantly the result of three decades of our own bad decisions and poor money management — and we remain as troubled as ever, albeit for different reasons to those that caused us pain in 1994.
Yet somehow we still both have a sense of hope for the future — going into the most important election since Nelly M, as he’s known today, cast his vote at Ohlange Institute in Inanda on 27 April 1994.