Trevor Obama or Barack Manuel?

A friend in the United States who watches Barack Obama tells me that he, unusually for a politician, has Mandela-like qualities in that he acts as a unifying force, finding common ground on which to build consensus on the way forward.

We could well do with someone with Mandela-like qualities now. The economy has slowed, Eskom’s management has been preoccupied with its bonuses instead of ordering enough coal and the police chief and president-apparent are both facing charges longer than all their limbs combined.

In the spirit of lawlessness that prevails, the mob is taking over, stripping girls deemed to be unsuitably dressed and sexually assaulting them in a manner that carries the charge of rape.

It would be nice to be able to point to the private sector as a paragon of virtue, holding the high ground, but if our leading corporate citizens are not thieving from the poor by fixing bread prices, they are manipulating milk supplies or medical provisions to public hospitals or selectively choosing which laws they wish to follow, as in the case of Imperial, which decided to smash turn-of-the-century buildings in defiance of a heritage protection order.

So it is easy to feel depressed. Many must have braced themselves for a bad-news budget.

But here is Manuel saying there is room for neither gloom nor panic. While others, notably Mbhazima Shilowa, threw in the towel after Polokwane, Manuel’s is not a quitter’s budget.

It is full of new ideas, new reforms, new energy and new leadership. Where the exiting president has asked for business unusual, Manuel has given us business as usual, continuing the trend he started years ago of improving the country’s finances and economic performance.

A unifying force, Manuel is comfortable — and popular — in Parliament, talking to the issues. There are reforms to make the tax regime more internationally competitive, while also bringing in measures to help small business do what it does best, create jobs.

But at the same time the growing economy is being used to pump more into social upliftment, with R350-billion going this year into health, welfare, education and housing. Social-welfare payments, to 12,5-million people, top R75-billion.

Nice to say is that the African National Congress’s choice, at present, of president to run the country, Jacob Zuma, was in Parliament to hear Manuel’s speech, having specially flown in from Mauritius, where he is asking a court to prevent evidence being made available to the South African courts, not to mention the public here. Obama brings excitement as a possible president of the US. It would be good to share the same enthusiasm about Zuma.

But I am betting that he will not be our next president, there already being numerous signs of discord in what is called the Zuma camp as its key personnel position themselves for the top job on the basis that jail bars might prevent Zuma from attending his inauguration.

I do not know how the accommodation arrangements work in prison, but there is the possibility of Zuma sharing a cell with his financial adviser, comparing notes on what might have been.

I can’t hero-worship Zuma in the way that I do Mandela, but I can still admire ordinary South Africans who are carrying on the business of daily life, living by example even while some of their leaders do not.

So I applaud the Jo’burg residents who stand in protest where a leading corporate, which should know better, has destroyed protected buildings.

And I relish the energy a talk-show host gave to the outrage taxi drivers perpetrated on a miniskirted woman.

And I hope that Manuel will not give up the fight. He is somewhat older than Obama, but still a young man in the context of being a future president of this country.

Obama is yet to secure the Democratic Party’s nomination, but his momentum grows daily. He will then have to convince that country as a whole that he should have the top job.

But the world’s only superpower could soon have a black person as president, an event surely as politically significant in its own way as the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Obama resonates because he is seen as a figure of hope; a commodity in short supply in South Africa. Manuel’s budget has resonance, not because of the priorities it has set, or because it counters the widespread despondency, but because it is saying that we can all do better than we are doing now.