Between hope and despair SA at 30: between hope and despair

• Published date: 26 April 2024
• Publication title: Business Day (Johannesburg, South Africa)

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 well-resourced National Treasury and sound finance ministers who enjoyed...