Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as South Africa's first black president on May 10, 1994. In the intervening 14 years, the country has struggled to realize the promises of its early post-apartheid years.
Posted on 06/11/2008 8:27:44 AM PDT by MinorityRepublican
When Nelson Mandela took power from the white minority government in South Africa in 1994, the longtime anti-apartheid activist held out hope that this was the beginning of the end of his people's poverty and the decades-long oppression that kept them in it.
His gestures of reconciliation toward his and their erstwhile oppressors are credited with avoiding bloody conflict in the country, leading the world to hail South Africa as a "miracle."
Today, South Africa is at a crossroads. The heirs to Mandela's legacy are battling among themselves, as the hope he inspired is fading under the weight of unmet needs for the black masses.
This is no excuse, but it makes it more understandable how, once started, recent attacks on immigrants from other parts of the continent to South Africa spread like the kerosene fires that destroy entire neighborhoods after poorly constructed stoves explode while meager dinners are being prepared.
It was pent-up rage that, in the end, was misdirected at immigrants who have fled their own economic or political impoverishment to enjoy the fruits of South Africa's "miracle" — a miracle that may, in fact, have been a mirage.
When I first came to South Africa in 1985 on one of many assignments I would take over more than two decades, an Afrikaner told me the reason for not permitting "one person, one vote" was that South Africa was both First World and Third World.
By that, he meant the whites who controlled the economy and reaped its benefits, including a first-class education, were First World. And the blacks, who labored in the mines, the fields, the kitchens and other rooms of the privileged, and who were being deliberately undereducated so that they could remain subservient, were Third World.
But as I traveled around the country in recent weeks, reporting for the NPR series "South Africa at the Crossroads," those words came back to me, albeit in a different context.
Even with a black-led government, the country remains two separate nations: one white and largely in control of the economy; the other, a majority of blacks still outside the economic mainstream.
Of course, successful, high-profile black millionaires and even billionaires exist. But the nation's official unemployment rate is more than 25 percent. Unofficially, it's as high as 85 percent in the townships and informal settlements. The legacy of the apartheid system of separate and unequal education has left most of the unemployed without the skills to compete in an emerging market economy.
President Thabo Mbeki's government has received plaudits in financial circles at home and abroad for the sound conservative fiscal policies it has pursued. But recent global and local shocks to the system, including spiraling gas prices and massive power outages, have caused economists and other analysts to predict a slowdown in the nation's growth and increasing trouble absorbing the unemployed masses.
South Africa also is dealing with one of the highest crime rates in the world. AIDS continues to put an enormous strain on the nation. And then there's another lingering legacy of apartheid: racism, still ever-present in a nation that Mandela hoped would reflect an ethnic rainbow.
South Africa's myriad problems are being exacerbated by the political battles within the ruling party. Accused of being out of touch with the needs of ordinary people, Mbeki lost control of the African National Congress to his main political rival, Jacob Zuma, in December.
So, for the first time in its short history as a ruling party, the ANC has two centers of power — a president of the party and a president of the country — leading to concerns that urgent needs of the nation's poor may become hostage to political gridlock.
In recent weeks, there have been calls for Mbeki to step down, but he has shown no signs of acting on them. Not long ago, he downplayed the turmoil within the party, insisting it was all part of the natural evolution of a liberation movement becoming a governing party.
Jody Kollapen, chairman of the Human Rights Commission, argues that South Africa may indeed be at a crossroads. But he says that perhaps critics and analysts (and journalists) should be taking a longer view, recognizing that South Africa is a new democracy, undergoing growing pains common to new democracies all over the world — including America's, during its early years of independence.
"Maybe it's time to recognize that South Africa is not a miracle country," Kollapen says. "Maybe we should just come down to earth and say, 'We're an ordinary people perhaps, having done some extraordinary stuff, but maybe the world should let us be an ordinary country.'"
Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as South Africa's first black president on May 10, 1994. In the intervening 14 years, the country has struggled to realize the promises of its early post-apartheid years.
What a bunch of fluff this article is.
Friends of my parents went to SA in 2000. The folks didn’t go because of “unrest” and reports of an increase in criminality within SA at that time.
When their friends came back from their trip, one said he wouldn’t go there again unless allowed to carry an AK47.
The violent and sex related crimes in SA makes our inner cities look like Disney World. None dare speak the truth-reverse racism coupled with ignorance has destroyed Africa..
Send Barack there to straighten the place out.
Is is a National Public Radio piece and could be nothing else.
Mandela’s legacy is a mirage. SA has a horrendous crime rate
and other problem it did not have under white rule. The PC boys can’t stand it.
Absolutely. The admission will never be made that apartheid, unfair as it seemed, was the only thing that kept the country from becoming the cesspool it is now.
Not to minimize the oppression of the blacks in SA but in the 1980s blacks stayed away from schools as a protest against the government. I'm not sure how that was supposed to hurt the government but that is what they did.
The one thing NPR could never address is that the ANC was a communist group and that SA now has a semi-socialist economic system with a massive and growing governmental sector that is deeply anti-free market. Could that possibly have anything to do with the problems? Nah, NPR wouldn’t even allow that as a option. Instead, though an entire generation has grown up and been educated under the new system, they have to blame the educational legacy of apartheid.
My understanding is that the ANC is still organized like the socialist/marxist organization it was. Centralized, top heavy, power-focused, with a heavily socialist economic policy. That would explain the dysfunctional economy, high unemployment rate, and thin layer of elites with millions of dollars. The ANC are “black” which allows them to claim legitimacy, but that does not mean the country is necessarily democratic.
I went to SA in 2005, hunting in the Transvaal. The government is spending mostly on social programs, like building cracker box housing in areas where there’s no commerce, in other words, no jobs. The infra-structure is crumbling. Many of the whites I met won’t even put their money in a South African bank or buy land, fearing a Zimbabwe style nationalization. Most of them have an exit strategy.
What is the exit strategy for most of the Afrikaners? Over a million of them left but there’s still four million Afrikaners remaining. If the events in the past 14 years didn’t get them to emigrate, then it looks like they’re staying in South Africa for the long haul no matter what because it is their homeland.
Whitey’s fault. It’s always Whitey’s fault.
Once again it’s some white guy’s fault.....
yahh, basically they are saying 10+ years of accomplishing nothing while the economy goes backwards and crime rates have skyrocketed is all the fault of “political infighting”.
Part of the problem is that the new African political elites haven't a clue about economics because their educational roots are in revolutionary socialism. All this allows them to do is conceive of an economy that is paternalistic, cronyist, and rapacious - great for continuing the socialist tradition of redistributing existing wealth, terrible for enabling anyone to generate new wealth.
Of course education is an issue if you're making microchips (hardly the occupation of any proletariat but I'm not sure the ideologues have noticed that). But we're talking micro-loans, Mom-and-Pop stores, trucking firms, laundries, building contractors - these occupations aren't demanding of educational infrastructure, but they are absolutely dependent on the rule of law and respect for property rights. Establish those and education will be able to flourish. Without them all the education in the world won't help.
Great idea!
Then after he fixes that mess we can give him Compton, DC, Oakland, New Orleans, Newark, Baltimore, Detroit...
bttt
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