Saving South Africa
Share with others:
It is hard to tell what is going on in South Africa, and whether, 18 years from the end of apartheid rule, the glass is half full or half empty in terms of how much progress it has made.
What is sure is that the trajectory of South Africa, for the sake its own population of 50 million but perhaps even more so for African continent, is extremely important.
South Africa is the economic locomotive that pulls the rest of Africa. It remains streaks ahead of sub-Saharan Africa's other countries in the sophistication and diversification of its economy, in its ability to generate capital, its standard of education, its infrastructure and, in principle, its political structure's ability to deal with the ethnic diversity that torments many African countries.
But there are problems. It is also the case that the reporting of American and other media on South Africa has tailed off into sketchiness as the drama of the majority's struggle against white rule merges further into the past.
The example of freedom fighter and former President Nelson Mandela remains a terrific inspiration to people such as An San Suu Kyi in Myanmar, Rabieh Kadeer of the Uighurs, the Dalai Lama of Tibet, Yulia Tymoshenko in Ukraine and even America's own Occupiers, waging a struggle of one kind or other in their countries against heavy-handed government. Mr. Mandela is now 93, but there has been no one in modern times quite like him, in both his persistence and in his tolerance and forgiveness once successful.
South Africa's difficulties lie in the magnitude of its basic problem and in the normal, human, yet decreasingly extraordinary quality of its leadership post-Mandela.
The basic problem lies in the gap between the standard of living of the country's previously suppressed majority and its former minority rulers, even though majority's leaders now control the country. They find themselves faced with the understandably large expectations of that majority but with only limited resources to address them.
First Published January 11, 2012 10:50 am
