The debate in Parliament two weeks ago about President Thabo Mbeki’s State of the Nation address contained two parallel debates — one looking back at the past, the other focused on the future.
While the African National Congress dwelled on history, beginning every speech with an exposition on the Freedom Charter, the Democratic Alliance and other opposition parties addressed the urgent challenges facing South Africa — unemployment, HIV/Aids, crime and education, to name but a few.
The majority party’s detours through the nostalgic past led to some rather bizarre contradictions and omissions.
Read the address given by the minister of health, for example, and you will find that she spent the bulk of her time talking about housing, since that was the section of the Freedom Charter she was assigned by the ANC’s speechwriters.
Review the president’s State of the Nation address itself, as well as his remarks at the close of the debate, and you will discover that he failed to refer to HIV even once. He referred to the Freedom Charter, however, at least six times altogether.
Certainly the Freedom Charter is an important document. Setting aside its communist-inspired passages, its core principle — “South Africa belongs to all who live in it” —remains the beating heart of South Africa’s constitutional democracy.
Nevertheless, South Africa is facing problems that simply did not exist half a century ago.
The people who gathered in Kliptown on June 26 1955 could not have imagined the staggering scale of the HIV/Aids pandemic, which killed about 400 000 South Africans last year alone. Still less could the Congress of the People have conceived that a democratically elected government would do so little to save the dying.
Nor would the authors of the Freedom Charter have foreseen that eight million adults would be out of work, that nearly 20Â 000 South Africans would be murdered every year and that a post-apartheid government would be working frantically to restore racial distinctions in land, labour and leisure.
So while historic anniversaries remain relevant, the overwhelming realities of the present demand urgent attention.
Some of these realities are positive and inspiring. South Africa’s economic growth rate is rising; business confidence is booming; our leaders are helping Africa claim her rightful place on the world stage.
It is indeed true, as the president declared, that South Africa stands at “a confluence of encouraging possibilities”.
But if we want to turn today’s possibilities into tomorrow’s probabilities, we will have to make some difficult choices.
On every issue of importance, the government’s ideological obsessions are frustrating its practical goals. And South Africa cannot long endure the contradictions.
We cannot, for example, hope to improve and expand government service delivery if we simultaneously carry out a policy of racial engineering that strips the public service of some of its most skilled and experienced employees.
We cannot uphold public trust in democratic governance if we allow the ruling party to paralyse every anti-corruption institution from Parliament’s standing committee on public accounts to the Scorpions.
We cannot forge a common, non-racial national identity if the president continues to insist that there is a “black South Africa” separate from a “white South Africa”, and that we must measure the progress of the nation as a whole by measuring the progress of one race relative to another.
And so South Africa faces a stark historic decision.
We can decide to keep building the power of the state such that it dominates every sphere of life, regardless of its capacity to fulfil its many tasks, and use that power for the benefit of people who fall into certain predetermined racial categories.
Alternatively, we can decide to build the power of the people by focusing the energies of the state on providing for the basic needs of every citizen — such as physical safety, health care and education —and thereafter allowing them the freedom to choose their own destinies.
The upcoming local government elections will offer a chance for South Africans to decide for themselves.
This will not be a “referendum on democracy”, as the president described last year’s general election.
It will be a referendum on delivery — and whether the path of greater state control, or the path of greater freedom, will define South Africa’s future.
Tony Leon, MP, is the leader of the Democratic Alliance