Zuma era held a mirror up to society
Sometimes perspective requires distance, perhaps always. It’s hard to nail down specifically what the past few tumultuous weeks mean for SA; what they say, what they don’t say, what the consequences are.
Like a painting still being completed, we can see the outlines but not the detail. I find myself vacillating between a new sense of hope and an old sense of foreboding.
The most obvious outline is that we have at the very least an opportunity for renewal, and it was that spirit President Cyril Ramaphosa (it still feels weird to say that) captured rather beautifully in the state of thenation address on Friday.
The repeated channelling of the Mandela era was much less gratuitous than I thought it would be, and the final quote from a song by recently deceased Hugh Masekela was a fine moment.
Ramaphosa essentially put on display his great trump card — his Mandela-esque ability to draw people together, to get them to agree, to make people feel included and respected.
He did so by tapping into another Mandela-esque trait; the call to service, which is the poignant message of the Masekela song:
“I wanna be there when the people win the battle against AIDS; I wanna lend a hand. I wanna be there for the victims of violence and abuse. I wanna lend a hand. Send me.” Great lines. Yet at the same time, the devil in my other ear requires scepticism, demands realism and wants vengeance. This is not 1994. An enormous amount of water has flowed under the bridge and harking back to the glow of the Mandela era feels a little like a cop-out, and possibly a deliberate one at that.
South Africans are past masters at pretending to learn from history in such a way that it actually becomes obscured because it gets overwhelmed by the vicissitudes of the future.
The biggest question is, as always, the most obvious: what happened? SA’s unemployment rate went from 22% in 2009 to about 27% today.
The number of people in work has increased but not nearly as fast as the workingage population. To me, these statistics show something else seldom commented on: the increase in the workforce in absolute numbers rose from about 8-million to 9.5-million, an increase of some 18%, or 2% per year. This is in a population of about 56-million.
Take just one loosely comparable country: Colombia. The population is now about 50-million. People in formal sector jobs: 23-million. In any number of other countries the proportions are about the same. SA is a massive outlier.
It’s blindingly obvious that a huge quantity of economic activity still takes place outside the formal sphere. The job of South African society is not just to increase the number of formal jobs but to draw the excluded informal sector into the formal economy.
The reason they don’t is that taxes are extremely high and the level of regulations are fabulously onerous. No one wants to go there, partly I think because they just don’t trust the government and partly because the government provides so little that is useful.
SA is a suspicious place, made more so by a decade of corrupt officials sneaking off with bags of cash.
Fixing this is going to be brutal, but if it’s not done, SA will remain a laissez-faire society in which accomplishment is a function of fortune rather than fortune a function of accomplishment.
Former president Jacob Zuma was not an aberration; he was a function of this aspect of SA’s culture, where accountability is low and immorality high.
My friends who work in healthcare tell me despite huge increases in salaries of public sector nurses, the attitude towards work in hospitals is just breathtakingly lazy.
Of course, there are many extraordinary exceptions, but generally the work ethic in the public sector is appalling.
For years, South Africans have just responded to this by saying: “Well, this is the way we are.” But we now know down what road that leads. The Zuma era should be remembered not as a story of one man’s venality, but of the high point of a culture of carelessness and languor.
Here’s betting it won’t be.
THE ZUMA ERA SHOULD BE REMEMBERED NOT AS A STORY OF ONE MAN'S VENALITY, BUT OF THE HIGH POINT OF A CULTURE OF CARELESSNESS