The greatest risk to South Africa over the next 10 years is not our exploding inequality‚ our booming unemployment and our grinding poverty. It is not the plethora of dire scenarios that can be painted on the back of our people’s unmet expectations.
Our greatest threat lies in the possibility that the ANC and those few left among its intellectuals will lose confidence and allow the slothful‚ the weak-kneed‚ the corrupt and spineless among them to embrace the fashionable populism of our times.
For 10 years until Valentine’s Day this year the ANC had a leader who despised education (remember his accusations of “clever blacks”)‚ who discarded the party’s key intellectuals and who‚ right from the onset‚ flirted with populism at the expense of evidence-based policy-making.
Jacob Zuma’s greatest gift to the party of Pixley ka Isaka Seme and John Dube was to drag it down to a breathtakingly fact-free policy-making process.
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