Another legacy of squandered promise

Fifty years ago this week, a recently hired parliamentary messenger named Dimitri Tsafendas walked through the lobby, crossed the floor of the house to where then prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd had just taken his seat on the green leather benches and stabbed him four times in the chest.

It could all have been very different had Howard Thomas, assistant accountant at the Standard Bank Adderley Street branch, offered multilingual Tsafendas the job he had applied for just two months previously.

His application, dated 9.7.66 and still in Standard Bank archives, made wide-ranging claims about his skills. Thomas interviewed him but found him vague and without references, and sent him on his way.

Had Standard Bank hired Tsafendas, it might have been Thomas who was stabbed to death instead, and the assassin would not even be a footnote. As it turns out, Tsafendas, who died in a mental hospital 17 years ago, changed the course of South African history.

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Verwoerd was pivotal in defining the system of economic, political and social exclusion that haunts South Africa to this day. The anniversary of his death is a healthy reminder that bad policy decisions can have long and torturous consequences.

For Afrikaner Nationalists, Verwoerd was a visionary. Veteran political journalist Allister Sparks, who met and interviewed Verwoerd many times, describes him in his recent autobiography, The Sword and the Pen, as a thinker and loner who would devise some of the more intricate aspects of apartheid while locked away in his Tuynhuys office.

His receptive acolytes were only too eager to implement the ideas, to the detriment of millions.

Ironically, the '60s produced stellar growth rates. Verwoerd took South Africa through the equivalent of a Brexit, holding a referendum to leave the Commonwealth.

The country was on the brink of being thrown out anyway amid mounting objections, mostly from African members who refused to tolerate South Africa's race-based politics.

Rather than face the humiliation of being ejected, Verwoerd took the calculated risk that he would get more than 50% of white South Africa to agree to leave and form a republic - and did. South Africa found itself a pariah.

Policymaking that drove industrialisation and import substitution, such as the development of Sasol and Iscor, led to an economic boom.

Local companies faced little if any foreign competition, and the seeds were planted for our highly concentrated economy. Firms such as Anglo American and South African Breweries ended up controlling a massive chunk of the economy. The legacy remains.

Growth peaked at 8.9% in 1965 and averaged about 6% through the '60s.

Few considered the long-term consequences of excluding more than 80% of the country from participating in the boom.

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Now South Africa is teetering on the edge of a sixth recession in 40 years.

After the boom of the '60s, the country felt the pain of the global oil crisis in the mid-'70s and shrank again, twice, in the '80s - first in '83, and then, post the Rubicon speech, in 1985.

The economy contracted in the face of pre-election uncertainty in the run-up to 1994, and, in 2009, amid the global financial crisis, the economy once again shrank.

All of this seems to be forgotten in the noise and the hype of the current political land grabs, and it is the most vulnerable in society who will once again fall victim to destructive politics and poor policy choices.

South Africa leveraged the Nenegeddon crisis of December into the most extraordinary post-democratic collaboration between business, labour and the government to find a common understanding on what is needed for the inclusive growth that evaded the architects of apartheid.

We are at risk of chucking it all away. Again.

Whitfield is an award-winning financial journalist and public speaker