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South Africa after Mandela By Dirk Rezelman New president Thabo Mbkei faces challenges, but the future looks brighter than the past I am happy to have spent this last spring of the century in Prague. To most of my fellow South Africans, Prague is a Gestalt of surrealism, Kafka and failed communism. South Africa, on the other hand, is an equally unknown quantity to most Czechs I speak to. Some families, I discovered, have relatives there who emigrated in the '50s or '60s and are doing very well in my nation of over 40 million people of vastly different ethnic and national backgrounds. On June 2, South Africans went to the polls in their second democratic elections and, predictably, the African National Congress (ANC) of retiring President Nelson Mandela won, with the Democratic Party in second with about 10 percent of the vote. In Prague and other places where I traveled in the Czech Republic, there was a keen interest in South Africa, although information was scant. This is not surprising, as the realities of politics over the last half-century have kept our nations apart, each in its own totalitarian cocoon. Many with whom I spoke here found it incomprehensible that the ANC of Nelson Mandela, a respected figure, could have a warm association with the South African Communist Party, an election ally of the ANC. Admittedly, the ANC has declared itself in favor of an open-market economy and against forced central planning. Issues in the South African election included the high rate of unemployment with resultant horrifying high crime statistics, failing public services and high interest rates. To the ANC, the crime rate is a legacy of the country's apartheid past. Under the former regime, there was scant attention paid to human rights issues and elimination of enemies of the state by the state was found to have been a part of the system. The ANC argues that unemployment and crime go hand in hand and that the former regime holds much responsibility for this. It fails, however, to explain how rapes, which occur at the rate of one per minute, fit into the convenient picture of why crimes have to be historically positioned. About 40 percent of the majority black population is technically jobless, and among the whites, there is an unemployment rate of about 5 percent. Many professional people of all groups are emigrating or considering emigration, which can further weaken the country's skill base. Medical doctors resent the government's recent introduction of compulsory service in rural areas where medical skills are urgently needed. The doctors argue that as they paid for their own training, the government has no right to compel them to render services in socially backward areas. Since the ANC's assumption of power in 1994, there has been a tendency to be thin-skinned toward objective journalistic comment and criticism of the government's actions. Some journalists have found they stand to be accused of a lack of patriotism because they report factually on the nation's crime rates and on its failure to attract significant foreign investment. The tourism industry is also dampened by reports of internal problems. But none of this reflects badly on the current situation in the country when compared with the relative lack of choice and freedom under the apartheid government. People are now free to make their mistakes and hopefully to benefit from the experiences in making some choice over the directions their lives take. For the average white South African, of which I am one, the transition to democracy from a totalitarian rule that benefited only one section of the varied population has not been traumatic. Some blacks want a more rapid and more apparent change, one conceivably where all vestiges of white privilege will be scrapped. Winnie Mandela, former wife of the president, is more cynical. She contends that the newly elected elitist blacks have simply taken over the privileges of the former masters and have no intention of sharing them with the masses of the population. Making democracy work in Africa been neither easy nor successful. In the whole continent, only a handful of states have any pretense of a multiparty system, dictatorships and military rule being the norm. The president-in-waiting, Thabo Mbeki, is very aware of the continent's failures to come up to accepted democratic standards and has promised that South Africa will not follow the usual African route to totalitarianism, poverty, ethnic wars and universal condemnation. He inherits a secure presidency from the almost iconlike Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years in prison before being released prior to his assumption of the presidency. He inherits a nation that is tired of being rejected by the world and that wants to play out its deserved historical role not only in Africa, but in the world. Above all, Mbeki seems to have the sense of mission that places South Africa as the continent's most developed region in the position where it will be the gateway as well as the mentor to the rest of Africa. A prosperous, happy South Africa, freed of the hang-ups from the past, is waiting in the wings to be ushered onto the world stage. Ringmaster Mbeki must make it work. -- The writer is a South African journalist now working for the University of Zululand. He was in Prague recently promoting Czech-South African cooperation. |
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The Prague Post Online contains a selection of articles that have been printed in The Prague Post, a weekly newspaper published in the Czech Republic. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited.