Dear friends and family,
As is my custom, I offer you comment on matters current and past. Below is my take on South Africa after the disastrous rule of president Zuma and his associates in politics and in business.
My second offering is on the passing of Winnie Mandela in April. Also, there are numerous new entries on my website, as listed in my email associated with this Newsletter.
Our new political landscape
By the slimmest of margins, Cyril Ramaphosa was elected ANC president and then assumed office on February 15 after an acrimonious power struggle inside the ANC. The good news is that Ramaphosa has brought hope, stability and predictability to our 24-year-old democracy.
After the hopeless years of Zuma at least part of the nation currently bask in Ramaphoria. His swift actions to clean up some corruption and decay left by Zuma is most welcome. His first cabinet is still not rid of many a crooked or incompetent minister. This tells us just how delicate the balance of power is inside the ANC.
Ramaphosa is capable, energetic and efficient. It is a welcome that he does not tolerate lateness (at meetings and appointments), a national trait that deserves challenging. He acts statesman-like, is responsive to national issues that Zuma and his gang ignored and brings back argument and intellect into the running of a modern state.
Also, remarkable for any politician, he shows he has a conscience and an ability to relate to the anger felt in society. In his inaugural presidential speech, he spoke of atonement in relation to his role in the Marikana massacre. We await his actions following such sentiment.
At the funeral of Winnie Mandela he addressed “woundedness” felt across the nation in relation to the unfinished business apartheid left us with. These are rare qualities in politicians.
The ANC remains deeply divided into the Zuma group who continue see Zuma as a martyr, aspiring to a new narrow (racial) nationalism. They recognise in Ramaphosa a tie to the rich and powerful, which substantially represents old white capital.
The manoeuvres at the top, I have little doubt, will once more ignore the poor and their right to education, health care, a living wage, decent houses, despite promises wrapped in powerful rhetoric.
Worst of all they see this elite basking in affluence and often decadence at the top of the social pyramid while they continue to suffer. Can Ramaphosa fix this?
The ANC factions are poised on a knife’s edge in equal numbers and influence. The deputy president is also Ramaphosa’s most ruthless opponent.
The “top six” in the ANC are divided down the middle. Ironically, the good that Ramaphosa is bringing has dented the electoral prospects of the DA and the EFF.
Both flourished while Zuma floundered, which is also an indictment of the shallowness of opposition political programmes.
And while the ANC fights itself and the opposition parties have little on offer, Rome is burning:
* Our politicians seem impervious to the low-level civil war going on throughout South Africa. The poorest in the townships are barricading roads and highways with burning tyres at several places throughout South Africa each day. (On radio the reports about traffic congestion have given way to reports on roads barricaded by angry, poor people.) The EFF promotes more tyre burning in the streets while the ANC and DA believe it’s a matter of law and order the police must deal with.
We are, by any measure, one of the most unequal countries in the world. Even the World Bank confirms this in its recent study.
* The Zuma years have increased the divergence between rich and poor, making the gap worse than during apartheid. The social grants system helps 17 million out of a population of 57.5 million. Fiscal constraints do not allow for this form of aid to continue to grow.
* Unemployment is high and rising, notably among young people. Estimates are that more than 40% of people are unemployed or no longer looking for work. There is no quick fix to this, especially in a country that lags behind in rebuilding a manufacturing sector.
* We also have the worst educational outcomes of any country. Our school system has failed. Reading, comprehension and maths at school level find us at the very bottom. All this despite huge budgets and a huge privately funded non-governmental sector.
This should impel our politicians to stop name-calling each other at parliamentary, provincial and city level. They might as well live in a different country.
Zuma is said to have considered calling a state of emergency in order to cut the ground from under Ramaphosa before he was toppled. Instead, the real emergency should unite politicians across the board to urgently deal with poverty, jobs, education, training, land redistribution and the growing insurrection taking place in townships right now.
National Development Plan
Plaintive hopes that the National Development Plan can save us, I submit, is nothing more than propaganda, with goals that will keep being postponed indefinitely.
Unless we begin the discussion of restitution with redistribution and a measurable plan that addresses the deepening divide between rich and poor, everything else is fiddling while Rome burns.
What should be done can be done within the terms prescribed in our constitution, our Bill of Rights and open democratic conduct.
The report documents the progress South Africa has made in reducing poverty and inequality since the end of apartheid, with a focus on the period between 2006 and 2015.
The main conclusions are: By any measure, South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world. Inequality is high, persistent, and has increased since 1994.
Although South Africa has made progress in reducing poverty since 1994, the trajectory of poverty reduction was reversed between 2011 and 2015, threatening to erode some of the gains made since 1994.
Poverty is consistently highest among black South Africans, the less educated, the unemployed, female-headed households, large families, and children.
Poverty has a strong spatial dimension, too, a demonstration of the legacy of apartheid. Low-growth perspectives in the coming years suggest poor prospects of eliminating poverty by 2030.
The death of Winnie Mandela
The death of Winnie created a national outcry of anguish. More than in life she became our collective liberator, a heroine and the icon of struggle and resistance.
As a woman she became the collective fighter for gender equality. This was best expressed by her daughter at the funeral. She asked why infidelity by heroic men was ignored yet her mother was condemned. She made an absolutely valid point.
But the shrill defence and support of Winnie quickly turned on all who voiced any criticism of her. The Stompie travesty of the late 1990s was obliterated and became an invention of reactionaries, apartheid apologists and agents.
Such falsification holds profound danger and truth-telling of history to future generations. I am painfully conscious of such rewriting of history when Afrikaner and German nationalism were created.
Those now hailing Winnie über alles are a response to the promise of 1994 that never happened. We remain in search for true equality, an egalité that eludes us. May
Winnie rest in peace.
* See www.horstkleinschmidt.co.za and go to Newsletters.
* Kleinschmidt is an anti-apartheid and human rights activist