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Invited essay
By William Shoki
Mr. Shoki is a South African journalist and editor-in-chief of Africa Is a Country. He wrote from Cape Town.
The rite went almost unnoticed. On a cloudy April day in Pretoria, South Africa’s administrative capital, President Cyril Ramaphosa delivered a lackluster speech commemorating the end of white minority rule in South Africa. When Nelson Mandela appointed the country’s first black president, sunny skies with hope. Thirty years later, Mr. Ramaphosa’s angry expression on a dark background is the symbol of decline. Ramaphosa’s party, the African National Congress, has been politically dominant since the country’s first democratic vote in 1994. In Wednesday’s general election, it could lose its parliamentary majority for the first time.
It is uncharted territory. On several occasions, South African President Jacob Zuma proclaimed that the ANC would rule “until Jesus returns. “Today, Zuma hopes to topple the party that allowed his famous transplant. Founded in December last year, uMkhonto weSizwe, or M. K. , named after the ANC’s shaping military wing, features it as its face. Even though he was disqualified through the highest court in the country, the party mobilized thousands of its followers in its populist agenda. If it manages to triumph over its factional infighting and legal troubles, it could pose one of the biggest dangers to the ANC’s vote share and force it to form a coalition.
The emergence of the match is now one of many morbid symptoms South Africa is experiencing. The African National Congress is devoid of its purpose, it is a shadow of its former self, and the country it has ruled for a long time suffers from problems due to the collapse of infrastructure, systemic corruption, the decline of central authority, and violent crime. Thirty years after the end of apartheid, South Africa is in the midst of a complex transformation. What happened next is unclear. But given the country’s fragmentation, this is unlikely to be a smart thing to do.
How did we get here? During his State of the Nation report in February, Ramaphosa praised the country’s post-apartheid trajectory through the fictional character of Tintswalo, a woman born in 1994 who would benefit from the deracialized expansion of social media. education, housing, electricity and physical care. As many have pointed out, this democratic dividend persisted for at least the first 15 years of South Africa’s post-apartheid history, when economic expansion was strong, foreign market situations were favorable, and state control competent. .
The turning point came in 2009, the year Zuma took power and a year after the global currency crisis. This has led to a general decline in life opportunities, political expectations and economic prospects. marred by a series of episodes that have broken the consensus: the Marikana bloodbath in 2012, in which 34 minors were murdered by the police; the formation of the Economic Freedom Fighters in 2013 through a former member of the ANC youth leader; the exclusion of the National Metalworkers Union from the country’s largest industrial union federation, officially an ally of the ANC; and student protests in 2015 and 2016.
All of these developments have called into question the conceptual underpinnings of the post-apartheid arrangement, adding the rainbow, the young state’s founding myth of a non-racial and cooperative democracy to the march toward progress aimed at healing the legacy of apartheid and colonialism. This universalist vision, summed up in the ANC’s 1955 Freedom Charter that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it”, has been undermined by persistent inequality and a state overrun by corruption. In its place, a vacuum has opened.
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