The year we went backwards

19 December 2014 - 02:03 By Ray Hartley
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Most people would describe 2014 as "a tough year", "a bad year", even "a grim year". Why is this so? What happened to make this the annus horribilis of the new South Africa?

It must be noted that it was not a bad year for everyone. It was the year that Bafana Bafana emerged from years of mediocrity to qualify for the Afcon tournament to be played in 2015 after bossing around some highly-rated opposition.

It was the year in which the Proteas won away in Sri Lanka and showed they could power their way to the top after the departure of Graeme Smith and Jacques Kallis. And it was the year of a famous Springbok victory over the All Blacks at Ellis Park, sending a message that we are still among the best in the world.

It was the year that Rolene Strauss won the Miss World title and Chad le Clos dominated in the pool.

But all of this achievement in sport and entertainment cannot hide the terrible truth that, when it comes to the economic and the political direction of the country, it was a year of reckoning.

Somehow, South Africa managed to conjure a crisis for every quarter.

In the first, miners went on strike for months, bringing the country's foreign exchange earnings to a grinding halt, weakening the currency and producing economic contraction.

In March, Public Protector Thuli Madonsela released the results of her exhaustive investigation into the scandal surrounding construction at President Jacob Zuma's Nkandla property.

She found that "The president is to take steps, with the assistance of the Treasury and the SAPS, to determine the reasonable cost of the measures implemented by the Department of Public Works at his private residence that do not relate to security, and which include the visitors' centre, the amphitheatre, the cattle kraal and chicken run [and] the swimming pool."

Zuma was ordered to "pay a reasonable percentage of the cost of the measures as determined with the assistance of the Treasury".

It was a bombshell that set the scene for a series of events which would rock the foundations of our democracy. Zuma simply refused to acknowledge wrongdoing or pay any money. The effect of this was to expose parliament - which then conducted its own hearings and rammed through its finding that Zuma was not to blame - as a defender of the ruling party.

Even as the battered rand was taking the eight count from the mining debacle, a barrage of punches from striking metalworkers in the second quarter sent it back to the canvas, where it lay bruised for the rest of the year.

Ratings agencies took note and we were downgraded to a notch above "junk" status, with a negative outlook. The cost of borrowing money rose and the prospect of executing the government's mired infrastructure programme receded further. The government had been selling the idea of a "developmental state" and firing up the economy with massive infrastructural investment. The fires of hope burned out and business was left grubbing through the embers of disappointment in search of some warmth.

In the third quarter, Julius Malema and his red-overalled Economic Freedom Fighters, who had come in with just under 7% of the vote in the May election, lit their own fire. Sensing a weak, rudderless parliament and an official opposition without a plan, Malema went for theatre, breaking the rules of debate and, in an ingenious act of attention-seeking, refused to leave the chamber while chanting: "Pay back the money" at Zuma.

Zuma's response was to turn his back on parliament and withdraw from all but the most stage-managed public appearances. Even the Gauteng ANC's conference was deemed too risky and he passed. It was, after all, in this province that he had been roundly booed at the Nelson Mandela memorial service in December last year. And there was the imposition of e-tolls, which even the provincial ANC could not bring itself to defend.

Even as scenes of anarchy in the National Assembly played themselves out on television, a new crisis began to emerge. By December it became clear to Eskom that it could not longer meet the demand for electricity.

Load-shedding was implemented across the country. A silo collapsed, generators went down, and the diesel generators ran out of fuel.

The signal was clear: even if the government were capable of planning infrastructure projects, even if capital were affordable, even if workers did not strike, there would be no improvement in economic growth for at least the next four years because there simply wasn't enough power in the grid to make it happen.

It was the year South Africa ran out of excuses. There was no global recession to blame. Even the ghost of apartheid, when summoned by Zuma to explain load-shedding, elicited rolled eyes.

More than that, and fivefold more alarming, it was a year of institutional weakness. Parliament became a rubber stamp for the executive, washed about on the tide of cronyism. The consensual labour relations regime collapsed, overwhelmed by chauvinist assertions of power. The public protector - the final resort of the people against the abuse of office - was pushed aside like a rag doll by Zuma's imperial presidency.

Books were written about the rising influence of the security apparatus. The courts retained their dignity, magisterially processing the Oscar Pistorius case. But what use is a good court when the prosecution service cannot even use the testimony of co-conspirators to put away a murder accused, as occurred with Shrien Dewani?

The chairman of the Independent Electoral Commission resigned over a tender scandal.

Without the institutional wherewithal to manage the exercise of power, democracy is under threat. I suppose we have our successes on the sports field, but then Caligula had his chariot races.

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