Will SA rise from its ashes?

I am sure Julius Malema and I chose Italy for a mid-year break for very different reasons, but I hope we learned some of the same lessons from that ancient society.

It is hard to believe that cities like Johannesburg and Cape Town or a society such as 21st-Century South Africa could be ruined by a few bad men: they seem to have momentum that surely would outlast any episode of misgovernment.

But a holiday in Italy this month reminded me of visits to Luanda and Maputo in the 1980s, where I first realised how quickly the work of decades can be undone.

Luanda in 1988 was a shell of a once grand city. The elite lived well, flying out regularly to refresh themselves and their wardrobes. There were a few grand restaurants for government employees, diplomats and foreign correspondents, where the food was as good as any you would get even in Brussels, and there was a beach resort where the scars of the super powers' proxy war were less evident than in the city.

But the civic infrastructure for ordinary people had totally collapsed. Roads had disintegrated. The landing strip of the national airport was lined with wrecks that no one had bothered to remove further than the edges of the tar.

There was no electricity or running water. You avoided walking on pavements in case someone in one of the overcrowded apartments above chose that moment to empty their slops over the balcony.

The president and his cronies spent their time chasing the massive profits to be made from arms and oil, paying lip service but not revenue to the cause of the poor.

Though different in detail, of course, that probably was pretty much what happened in Rome when the Barbarians invaded in the fifth century, ending the rule of the emperors, destroying roads, essential to Rome's contact with its imperial outposts, and shattering the intricate system of aqueducts that delivered water.

The huge city and its government collapsed, its buildings crumbled and its population shrivelled.

Maputo is now rising fast from the ashes of its externally sponsored civil war. Luanda is recovering, though probably not as fast as it would without the continuing curse of the same corrupt political elite that helped to destroy it.

But as most of Africa slowly rises, Italy today underscores the cyclical nature of governance. It teeters on the brink of another dark age as Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi continues to abuse political office and the budget to stay out of court.

The self-serving excesses of the Roman emperors sowed the seeds of their own defeat then as does the corruption of our current regime - albeit in a more modern metaphor.

If greed and nepotism are left unchecked, the South Africa we now cherish will collapse and the price will be paid by ordinary people here, just as it was in Angola, Mozambique and Rome.

North of Rome, in Tuscany, the scores of now picturesque hill-top fortresses symbolised the potential consequences of another South African phenomenon: factionalism in the ANC that President Jacob Zuma appears unable to control.

There were once more than 70 huge stone towers in the small city of San Gimignano, each the redoubt of one of the town's warring families seeking to gain or protect access to scarce regional resources.

Factions defended themselves with stone walls in those days.

Today, in South Africa, they do it with wealth, buying security, mobility and opportunity at the expense of everyone outside the fiscal fortress.

The good news is that Italy's long-term example is encouraging: emperors, dictators, governments and churches have come and gone, each leaving its own history of brutality and abuse, but the race has survived.

Italy's relics and ruins seem priceless today, underpinning its huge tourism industry and its cultural credibility. But they reflect terrible centuries of human suffering at the hands of elites who governed in absolute antithesis of what they claimed to stand for.

Even if we fail to stop the current decline, the South African nation will survive. But, as in Italy, we may have to fall a very long way and wallow in the trough for a very long time before the next renaissance.

Rome has risen from its own ashes many times. We, so far, have done so only once. Some natural disaster might require us to do so again one day, but we don't need to bring it upon ourselves when we have so much history in Africa and elsewhere to learn from.