It is a relief, isn’t it, when we take a moment to celebrate. Frankly, we need it right now amid presidential priapism and economic limpness. So we should be forgiven if we have found a warm and fuzzy moment in reflection on where we were when Nelson Mandela walked out of Victor Verster prison on February 11 1990.
It is the memory over which we warm our hands as we take stock of how far we have come since, an accounting exercise that can be rather chilling.
For black South Africans who were under the yoke of oppression then, today is indeed better than yesterday. And even more so for whites, who have profited immensely from the freedom dividend.
It would be blind, and a bit mad, to deny that we are better off in both material and spiritual ways.
But despite the building and electrification of millions of homes, the provision of water and sanitation, schools and access to health facilities, there are millions who remain unemployed and trapped in poverty.
Listening to the reminiscences of those who helped to arrange Madiba’s release, it is impossible not to notice how strongly their remembered values echo ours, but how widely the road has diverged.
Young people who fought the apartheid machine and showed promise as leaders have changed into tenderpreneurs, consumed by the battle for resources, amassing power and wealth and bling. Others are political ghosts, operating on the margins of a system that has no space for their contributions.
The service delivery protests in Balfour’s SiyaThemba township this week are instructive.
Twenty years on, people still feel that they have to take to the streets to make themselves heard, despite the fact that we now have a democratically elected government that should hear them long before they feel obliged to demonstrate.
But there are also important lessons from the old school for the current generation of protesters: it is an own goal to destroy a library while on the other hand demanding the building of a community-skills development centre and the creation of jobs, for example.
That most of the infrastructure they are destroying was built by this government would surely pain Madiba. Communities are entitled to demand answers to their grievances, but it would hurt Mandela to watch the legacy — however limited — of his government being smashed to underline new demands.
We also hope that people’s real desperation is not being used to advance the interests of some politicians, as local government elections approach and the battle for positions starts.
It is obvious, but we will say it anyway: the right way to honour Mandela’s legacy is to continue the struggle against current injustice, racism, growing inequality and ongoing poverty and corruption.
Back to the accounting then. Our lives are better, but they are not better enough, and not enough for all of us. And our leadership, as much as it wants to dress in Madiba’s borrowed robes, is woefully inadequate when measured against his legacy.
We must look up then, from our nostalgic moment, make a cold assessment of the man who purports to tell us the state of the nation, and in the yawning space between cosy and freezing, demand better.
Ag pleez, Pravin
We know a few things about next week’s budget. First, it will be tight. The recession has been brutal. Second, many of Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan’s Cabinet colleagues are unfazed by the red ink on the national income statement and are asking for implausible allocations.
In the parliamentary hearings that follow the budget speech there will be a miserable keening noise from committee room E249 as they tell MPs their woes. Some are legitimate. Others Gordhan must use all his political courage to ignore.
There are a few easy wins. He can back the growing consensus that the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor programme should be shut down (not just mothballed) and he can continue to pull back support from those parastatals that cannot make a clear case for their role in economic development.
What Gordhan will probably not be able to do is halt the momentum towards more state spending on industrial policy initiatives. After years of Cabinet in-fighting, Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies’s gladiatorial capabilities have pushed state-driven strategies to boost labour-intensive manufacturing much higher up the agenda. Gordhan will not like the inefficiencies and distortions that this threatens to introduce and he is going to have to be tough to ensure that the pressure is channelled productively.
We know, too, that we are going to hear something about inflation targeting and the mandate given by the treasury to the Reserve Bank. It is unlikely to be earth-shattering — the core plank of South Africa’s monetary policy will remain in place.
What we really want from the minister is to understand that this government has a coherent economic policy, rather than just a grab bag of interests. We also want him to make good on the corruption-fighting promises he made in the October mini-budget. The treasury is not a police force, but it is better placed than any other body to see where the cash is going.