South African President Thabo Mbeki, set to return to power after Wednesday’s landmark elections, will be under intense pressure to deliver on the Herculean problems of grinding poverty and Aids, analysts say.
As South Africans take stock 10 years after the end of apartheid, Mbeki is credited with doing much to make the economy healthy, but he is criticised for failing to tackle these scourges.
Mbeki’s African National Congress party is poised to win a resounding victory in parliamentary elections on Wednesday that will be followed by a vote on April 23 by the new legislature to elect a president.
Nelson Mandela, the iconic first leader of post-apartheid South Africa, ushered in political liberation and ended the country’s isolation in the world community.
Mbeki built on that but failed to decrease the yawning chasm between the haves and have-nots: wealthy whites and black nouveaux-riches who live in sprawling suburban houses, and the poor struggling to survive in shantytowns.
”Forty-eight percent of the population is living under the poverty line, earning less than R530 ($84/69 euros) a month,” said Sampie Terreblanche, professor at the University of Stellenbosch.
”Forty-two percent of the labour force is unemployed. In the past 10 years, poverty has deepened and unemployment has increased,” he said, adding that the unemployment rate in 1994 — when apartheid formally ended — was 30%.
The official figure puts unemployment at more than 31%.
Terreblanche said affirmative action — a controversial government policy to empower blacks and other races marginalisd during apartheid — only benefited the haves.
”Only about the top 10-million blacks have reaped the benefits, and the already rich have become super-rich, while the 22-million blacks living in abject poverty have been passed by,” he said.
Another burning issue for Mbeki is the Aids pandemic, which kills 600 people a day, according to Aids groups, with an estimated 5,3-million people, or one in nine South Africans, living with HIV or Aids.
Just four years ago, Mbeki infamously questioned the link between HIV and Aids and labelled anti-retrovirals ”dangerous,” drawing trenchant criticism.
The Aids lobby group, Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), predicts Aids will peak in 2007 with 500 000 deaths annually and ”there will be more real evidence that Aids cannot just be wished away,” says TAC spokesperson Pholokgolo Ramothwala.
Mbeki’s government early this month started distributing free anti-Aids drugs at a few state hospitals in three of the country’s nine provinces.
The cabinet had approved a national treatment plan last November but failed to keep its promise to provide free anti-retrovirals (ATRs) to more than 50 000 people by the end of March.
Economic commentator Kevin Wakeford said the first five years of black rule under Mandela were about ”political emancipation,” adding that his successor Mbeki had buttressed South Africa’s global image and improved the economy.
”Under Mbeki there was fiscal austerity, a reduction of national debt and the budget deficit, which is now lower than three percent… The rand firmed up. Mbeki proved sceptics and Afro-pessimists wrong,” he said.
”But this term will have to be about economic emancipation,” he said.
”Some two million jobs were lost over the past 10 years.”
Wakeford said this was largely due to the fact that Mbeki had ”jumped into liberalisation and globalisation,” which had led to labour-saving technology and unfair competition.
”Many companies did not have the time to re-engineer. The footwear sector is collapsing and there is haemorrhaging in the clothing sector. Our agricultural sector is finding it difficult to compete with the huge subsidies in the West.”
Wakeford said correctives included providing greater credit access for small businesses, doing away with red tape, and 10-year tax holidays for new micro-ventures.
”His biggest challenge will be to re-formulate the economy to make it more broad-based so that more people are involved in the process of wealth creation,” Wakeford said. ‒ Sapa-AFP