I flew into SA in the second week of spring. This time the new season did not herald hope and renewal. It was the spring of despondency. The country had plummeted into the foulest mood I had experienced among my fellow countrymen in decades. News of Uyinene Mrwetyana’s brutal murder was still fresh. The crime statistics were horrendous. Economic indicators showed we are a country in crisis. The currency was plumbing new depths.
Again and again I was reminded that it’s not just the whites who are leaving. It’s the blacks too, I was told. Business confidence indices sealed the cocktail of pessimism, saying the mood was the bleakest since the mid-1980s.
As has been proclaimed again and again over the past year, President Cyril Ramaphosa’s New Dawn was said to be dead in the water. The ANC’s divisions were too much for him, many said, and the popular narrative was that the president is ineffective, isolated, out of touch and overwhelmed by the fightback within his own party.
His silence as xenophobic attacks spread — and the propaganda videos that accompanied them spread even faster across Africa — condemned him even more. The shorthand for SA was neat: a country that was rebuilding strongly under Thabo Mbeki had fallen far and fast and its current leader can’t clear out the rot from what he called the lost decade of Jacob Zuma.
Cut and run, cut and run, was the message.
The truth is a little bit more complex than that. After a month of talking to a large cross-section of South Africans, from captains of industry to those who have given up looking for work, I believe Ramaphosa and his team have a 55% chance of succeeding and turning the country’s fortunes around.
Of course Ramaphosa has moved at a snail’s pace on issues where he could have reaped quick wins for himself and the country. There are areas of the economy where the dawdling and prevaricating are totally unnecessary.
It boggles the mind that our tourism industry is still so bedevilled by red tape, for example. One would think we don’t want the tourist dollars to come to our beautiful country. The ministers of home affairs and tourism should, quite frankly, be fired.
I have lived in the US, the UK and Zimbabwe and have spent large chunks of time in Nigeria. I now live in Los Angeles. Believe me when I say that for the middle classes, black and white, SA is on par with some of the best in the world for quality of life.
Yes, there is crime — it’s horrendous and it’s getting worse. Yes, South Africans live in constant fear of being attacked. But, gosh, in the month I have spent in Johannesburg, I have lived — as a middle-class person — in a manner that is equal to if not better than that of many in the developed world. It’s not always better somewhere else. It’s different.
In the month I have spent in Johannesburg, I have lived - as a middle-class person - in a manner that is equal to if not better than that of many in the developed world
I was shot at in my house in Johannesburg in 2006. The perpetrators have not been arrested and never will be. I knew this right from when the police arrived and nonchalantly contaminated the crime scene.
But in the US my children live with the constant dread that I will be shot by a racist cop. I am a black man. They don’t shoot white men. White men walk into schools almost every day and kill students.
If you are a middle- or upper-class person in SA, don’t underestimate your privilege. You have a good life here. It doesn’t mean you live without the constant fear of being raped and murdered, of your house being invaded, of being hijacked. But one must stand up against all that, and mustn’t forget that it is precisely because this place is so good that one must agitate for Ramaphosa and his team to make it better.
It’s the areas of politics and economics that seem to have led to total despondency. As the ANC’s leaders continue to tear at each others’ throats for power and pull in different directions on economic policy, many have wondered who, in fact, is driving this thing called SA. Is it Ramaphosa or is it the dreaded Ace Magashule of the Free State?
Ramaphosa has seemed eager to please his comrades, allowing Magashule to pronounce naively on everything from quantitative easing (a subject he knows nothing about) to who should be running the country (a subject he knows nothing about).
Ramaphosa has let the insults and acts of insubordination slide. That has consequences: everyone is left wondering who, exactly, is driving this thing. Their confidence dwindles when they realise that it is not “Safe Pair of Hands” Ramaphosa, but “What’s My Cut?” Magashule. Would they want to put their money into a South Africa that might be run by a Magashule clique after the ANC’s national general council next year?
Here again, though, the truth is complicated. Politics is toxic everywhere in the world right now. The Democrats in the US are moving to impeach President Donald Trump. The UK is run by a buffoon whose ham-handed actions on Brexit continue to imperil Europe. Across the globe, politics are failing the citizenry. Nigerians do not trust President Muhammadu Buhari or the system he represents.
South Africans are not the first people to be failed by politics and politicians and won’t be the last. There is something to be grateful for: the values Ramaphosa represents are head and shoulders above those of Boris Johnson in the UK and Trump in the US, and certainly way ahead of past president Jacob Zuma, the godfather of state capture.
Much has been done, but citizens forget about it swiftly and furiously simply because a Moody’s economic outlook is imminent and may tip the country into negative and then junk status. There is panic because the debt-to-GDP ratio looks horrendous; the unemployment figure shoots up; business confidence plummets.
The continuum, however, seems to be one of reform. It takes time. Sadly, this is a commodity neither South Africans nor Ramaphosa has. SA has a restive populace that takes to the streets and resorts to violence every day. Society is straining. Ramaphosa’s comrades in the ANC want to take him out.
I understand the doom and gloom. It’s been a hard and terrible winter. Yet SA has been here before and has seen far worse. It’s gonna be alright, to quote that former minister quoting the famous rapper. It’s gonna be alright.
• Malala is a writer and commentator based in the US
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