Since last year when Eskom plunged the country in darkness, perhaps for the first time professional critics - media, professional analysts, business - are acutely assessing the parlous state the country is in. It's approximately where South Africa was during the late 80s. Then it was the state of emergency, internal and external conflict and President PW Botha's kamikaze rule that threatened to take the entire country with him.
Now it's different but no less severe with a dangerously schizoid president and ANC in charge. The difference between then and now is this time there's the real danger of the lights - figuratively and literally - going off and with it calamity. For all the NP's faults, and without romanticising the time, they kept the lights on, industry going and infrastructure working (how Ukraine manages is something Ramaphosa should ask during his pointless and biased so-called peace initiative). But the ANC has found even the simplest governance tasks beyond them.
I'll ask how the ANC's erstwhile liberal-left supporters didn't see it coming. But we know it's because, as you describe, the ANC was romanticised as SA's purported heroes fighting the evil empire from the safe havens and sponsorship of Soviet Union and Europe (where many acquired a decent education ironically denied their black brethren at home). We know, but many chose to forget, the liberation wasn't won by the ANC, but mainly through local and international democratic movements' pressure on the West to impose sanctions.
Until the early 80s SA's economy wasn't doing too badly, not as good an a free economy though, in large part off gold and other mineral resources. Manufacture, the backbone of a growing and successful economy, peaked in the mid-90s at about 22% GDP but declined by half after democracy. It's hobbling along now. Until the 2008 financial crash, SA's peers grew while it didn't.
Moeletsi Mbeki's assessment of why the economy has stagnated is correct. There are reasons including Nationalism - BEE (see his book series Architects of Poverty which uses Sampie Terreblanche's work on the same and Mbeki's withering critique of BEE, its beneficiary Ramaphosa and other black oligarchs, oligarchy a politico-economic ideology Largedien says the ANC inherited from their Soviet/Putin masters), affirmative action, a labour-friendly market, a deliberately concentrated, inefficient oligarchic economy, rent-seeking and patronage (at 90%, corruption), etc.
In 40 years post-war the Afrikaner and other white Nationalists built SA into a continental, even global, economic powerhouse. They brought their people - Afrikaners in particular but whites in general - out of post-Boer War and WW2 poverty and working class to establish a broad-based white middle and upper class that lasts today. Out of nothing (except abundant, cheap labour) they created Iscor, Sasol, SAA, Transnet, Telkom, etc and first-world institutions.
Brown and blacks got leftovers, but that period saw SA elevated among middle income economies. (In the early 80s Mauritius was a poor nation, but like East African countries it's surpassing SA as an investment destination, and for some time too. I predict at current growth rates Ethiopia will match SA's GDP in under 20 years, just as Ireland and Singapore - population about 5 million each - came from half SA's in 1994 to matching and exceeding it now.)
Compare the ANC's record in only 30 years! Yes we got a Constitution, which had multiparty input though. But we can't live off a statute. After 1994, comparatively longer than it took the NP to do the same thing with all their resources, there were only some very rich blacks (as before, browns were ignored), Ramaphosa among them. But for the majority blacks and browns, poverty remained static and inequality and unemployment increased to the highest in the world. At the same time the country's assets were being stripped by the ANC.
To paraphrase Greg Mills in his book Why Africa is Poor, it's because the ANC wants us (except them) to be poor.
Like the 80s when FW de Klerk took power and held the referendum on change, the country is facing another defining moment when it must decide its destiny: vote ANC and see SA slide into Zimbabwe-like ruin out from which it may never recover, or cast our vote for other parties, any party except ANC or EFF.
South Africa is at a tipping point. This time we have no FW or Mandela to help guide us but fractious parties led by politicians most of whom don't inspire confidence. It seems the circumstances are more difficult than it was in the early 90s because of the absence of leadership and that many people are probably not aware of the almost uniquely fragile condition the country is in now.
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People believe the DA governing party in the Western Cape and Cape Town "is creating a conducive environment for jobs, delivering services, fixing infrastructure, unlike the rot happening everywhere else in the rest of the country".T list the WC's infrastructure projects under way.
As I've said variously, the ANC set the bar so low that one praises bureaucrats (and anyone else) for merely doing their jobs. The DA-led Cape Town and WC are able administrators and are not corrupt like the ANC, at least they are but with a small "c". (They too are and have been party to regulatory capture, influence peddling, favouritism and inward and outward political pressure. While financial adminstration is good, ethical and other soft governance standards are open to question.)
So the DA are praised for merely doing their well-paid jobs. Cape Town is said, complimentarily or perjoratively, to be a bubble; the WC a "well-run bubble". I don't know where you or the people who say that grew up but overall the City of Cape Town was always well managed, before and after 1994, even during the ANC's uneven to bad term. (Nomaindiya Mfeketo's, personally and her exco team, were bad. But she was promoted after 2006 to parliament and a diplomatic posting, typical of the ANC to reward poor service.)
Cape Town is different to other SA cities - critics say it's not an African city, or not enough. The same goes to an extent for the WC province but I think it's because the population is mostly brown (and white), from which the city drew, and to a lesser extent since employment equity, draws the majority of it's employees.
Brown people in Cape Town are not traditionally ANC supporters and do not imbibe the ANC's mindset, culture and work ethic. And for the average high school leaver, browns before 94 and today receive better education than at the dismal - thank ANC and SADTU for that - black township schools (to obviate that, blacks send their children to brown schools). Occasionally brown city (and other) employees told me how some black colleagues struggle with basic work concepts including computer proficiency. This might also be due to the workplace language - English - not being mother tongue, I don't know.
So Cape Town is different, and service delivery for many areas except poor is usually acceptable to good. It's what we've come to except. I understand it's better, even far better, than ANC-run municipalities which have been and are collapsing. But with Cape Town it's not that simplistic t say it's because the DA is running it which is the public perception and what they'd want you to believe. But if you ask me how much is due to good management rather than other, intrinsic factors I suggest, I'd say good management plays a good, although not decisive, part in it.
Recently in Daily Maverick Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis rebutted the criticism (from ANC and left) it neglects poor areas in favour of affluent ones. He listed "pro-poor" infrastructural projects - electricity, water, sanitation, etc as proof. But these are projects the city, as any must, invest in. So the boast is disingenuous and false really.
The other thing that irritates about the DA is they complain when the ANC uses public funds to boast but they, as Hill-Lewis did, does the same. Their biggest failing is hubris and overconfidence in their ability, and since Zille took control, overly concerned about white voters.
I replied in a letter to DM and forwarded it to the city executive. DM doesn't deign to publish readers' letters, I guess because we're not deemed erudite or important enough to be published.
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