Try to answer this honestly. Do you think the state of the country’s overall infrastructure (roads, electricity, water supply, transportation) was better in 1993 (the last year of legal apartheid) than in 2023 (30 years since the end thereof)? I posed this on my Twitter feed and 89% of respondents voted “yes, definitely”, while 11% said “no, better now”. Of course, these Twitter polls are not representative of the general population, but 2,410 respondents are worth taking seriously. Now I do not know who the 11% are, but I suspect they live under rocks in the Karoo because news from the wealthiest city on the continent is pretty dismal: weeks without water, hobbled by daily electricity outages and holes like craters in more and more Johannesburg roads is not what we had on the eve of democracy.
You can ask that question of almost any sector of the social and economic landscape, from education to health to urban housing. Never before have I seen so many shelters going up along main roads into and out of our great cities as desperate citizens risk life and limb trying to survive from day to day. Are we paying attention to how this government has single-handedly wrecked the social and physical infrastructure that holds the country together?
With our 2024 elections looming, I cannot forget one of the most abiding memories of an election debate in another country. Then US president Jimmy Carter was facing up to candidate Ronald Reagan in the only debate of the 1980 presidential campaign when the Californian posed this zinger to his American audience: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” To cut a long story short, the Hollywood actor went on to wipe out the sitting president in the elections and spend two (in my view, disastrous) terms in the White House.
Do you have more of a sense of personal safety and security than when apartheid collapsed? Can your girl-child walk to the shop or to her friend’s place without fear of being harmed?
Of course, black South Africans especially are better off than during apartheid; whites too, though many won’t recognise the fact. There is no state apparatus to randomly imprison and torture people for fighting for their freedom. You are not locked up in a Bantustan and more and more black citizens have become leaders in business, industry and academia without those chains of white supremacy that held us down.
You can now swim at any beach, attend any school and be a small business entrepreneur without being harassed.
In theory.
The truth is, you can’t actually swim at any beach; Durban's were shut down in December because of rank incompetence on the part of the city leaders who caused dangerous sewerage dumps into the holiday waters. You can’t attend any school you want because you need lots of money for fees, a house near a well-resourced institution and a transport system that works. Your small business is probably ruined because the government could not keep the electricity on, meaning you lost customers and income first because of Covid, then Eskom; you do not make the types of profit margins that could afford generators or inverters, so your dreams sank as a struggling hairdresser or a small restaurant owner. Not everyone has Shoprite’s capacity to spend R560m on diesel in just six months to run generators at supermarkets during blackouts!
So here’s the question again. Are you better off three decades later than you were in the last days of apartheid? In your day-to-day life, is there less crime than before? Do you have more of a sense of personal safety and security than when apartheid collapsed? Can your girl-child walk to the shop or to her friend’s place without fear of being harmed? Any honest South African would concede that we are in deep trouble criminally. In fact, we might well have tipped over so far that it is impossible to recover some sense of normalcy on the streets or in our barricaded homes.
Think for a moment of capacity and corruption in policing and let me use education examples. It is now 260 days since the head of fleet management at the University of Fort Hare (UFH) was brutally assassinated for ending corruption in his division and still no arrests. It is also 28 days since the bodyguard of UFH’s vice-chancellor died in a hail of bullets moments before dropping off his boss, but still no arrests. I have it on good authority there is direct evidence on the perpetrators, including an audio tape, but nobody has been charged, which is why so many people believe this rot goes all the way to the top.
Meanwhile, the bodies pile up.
I ask you again, are you better off now than under apartheid?
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.