South African President Thabo Mbeki told Parliament on Wednesday afternoon that the upcoming April election will be a test of whether doomsday theories about the failure of the economy are true.
Speaking in reply to the debate on his State of the Nation speech, which began on Monday, Mbeki said: “The forthcoming elections will provide our people with an opportunity to decide which of the various party responses to these challenges they consider the most credible and which among our various parties they consider the most dependable as our country continues the struggle to eradicate the legacy of centuries of racism and apartheid.”
Arguing that South Africa has made solid progress in the first 10 years of democracy, the president said those who hold the view that the situation in the country is worse today that it was 10 years ago “will have the opportunity to convince the people that this assertion is in fact true”.
He was referring to what official opposition Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon said in the debate on Monday.
“The South African reality is that for millions of our fellow citizens, life is no better now than it was in 1994 … In spite of political freedom, life is actually worse,” Leon said.
He was also referring to Inkatha Freedom Party president and Home Affairs Minister Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s view that “poverty in rural areas is today worse than before [democracy in] 1994, when we took over the running of this country.”
Mbeki noted, too, that United Democratic Movement leader Bantu Holomisa and United Christian Democratic Party leader PHK Ditshetelo will have the possibility in the election — to be held on Wednesday April 14 — “to convince the people about their rather strange economic views in terms of which the successful interventions to correct the disastrous macro-economic imbalances inherited from the apartheid years, are themselves the very causes of the perpetuation of the socio-economic inequities we also inherited from our past”.
In a jibe against Leon — whose party has plastered the area around Parliament with posters saying “South Africa deserves better” — he said: “The Honourable Tony Leon found what we must presume he thought was a clever answer to these questions [of the success of the past 10 years] when he said the truth is that we must distinguish between two nations. Not a black and a white nation. Rather, we are faced with the South African dream on the one hand, and the South African reality on the other.”
Turning to the nuts and bolts of social change in South Africa, Mbeki noted that Wednesday — February 11 — was the 14th anniversary of the release from prison of former president Nelson Mandela. He noted too that on Wednesday people were returning to “their beloved District Six” — a mixed-race area removed under apartheid’s group areas policy.
Among those returning to the Cape Town city bowl suburb will be Dan Ndzabela, who is 82 years old and was removed from District Six in 1959, as well as Ebrahim Murat, who is 83 years old and was removed from his home in 1967, Mbeki noted. — I-Net Bridge