Mandela or Zuma: SA will have to decide

I ENCOUNTERED two very different South Africas while reading Business Times on May 21.

The first one I found in “The struggle to put Prasa gravy train on a new track”, detailing corruption at the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa and how chairman Popo Molefe was thwarted in his efforts to have these corrupt practices investigated and stopped.

An identical picture has come to the fore with the shenanigans at Eskom, culminating in the circus around Brian Molefe’s reappointment as CEO.

This is the South Africa being fashioned by President Jacob Zuma and his followers — a South Africa whose resources are being looted by a few individuals; where there is increasing unemployment and poverty; economic decline to junk status; populist political slogans; and increasing antagonism between people.

Then, merely by turning the page, I encountered a second South Africa. In his column “What the Boers can teach us on SA”, Andile Khumalo tells how he met several emerging black farmers at the Nampo agricultural show and had a “refreshing eye-opener”.

He recounts how these farmers all told him how they had become successful farmers after having been given advice, grain seeds and the use of farm equipment, all free of charge, by neighbouring white farmers — an indication that mutual goodwill, racial harmony, integrity and joint purpose still exist in South Africa and can lead to success, prosperity and the upliftment of citizens of all races and classes.

This is the South Africa envisaged by Nelson Mandela and adopted enthusiastically by most South Africans during our early years of democracy.

So here is our choice: do we opt for Zuma’s South Africa, or do we return to the South Africa as envisaged by Mandela?

My concern is that the current crop of corrupt and incompetent government leaders and greedy, looting officials and profiteers are fast diminishing our country’s resources, and eroding goodwill and racial harmony.

If this is not stopped in time, there will be no turning back and there will be nothing left but self-induced poverty to “share equitably” among us all — except for a small, politically connected elite, of course.

This choice will have to be made sometime between now and 2019. If by the time of the 2019 elections we as South Africans are not capable of reversing the current trend, Mandela’s vision of a nonracial and peaceful South Africa with prosperity for all will be well and truly shattered. — Roel Goris, Knysna