TWO speeches reported on in the newspapers this week caught my eye. It is difficult to imagine two world views further apart than these two.
The first was delivered by President Jacob Zuma at the Africa Day celebrations in Pretoria at the weekend. Africans, he said, used to live peacefully and had fun with one another. Then “the others” came, those he wouldn’t call by name.
Of course, everyone in the audience knew who he meant: the whites. A few weeks ago, he said pretty much the same thing. He intimated that everything in South Africa was fine, until Jan van Riebeeck (in other words, the whites) came, and buggered everything up (my words, not his).
The second speech was by Dr Mohamed ElBaradei, a past director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency and former vice-president of Egypt, a day later, also in Pretoria. He told a meeting of the Thabo Mbeki Foundation that Africa could not blame colonialism any more for its problems.
He identified the continent’s main political problem: leaders who serve term after term in their positions and who later become a kind of establishment. He also pointed to the huge chasm between rich and poor in Africa and the gigantic sums spent on weapons systems, while very little is allocated for humanitarian aid.
Now contrast these two speeches.
SA's most incompetent leader ever
On the one hand, you have one from our own head of state, easily the most incompetent leader South Africa has ever known in its entire history, a man with a dark cloud of corruption charges hanging over his head, who clings to power with a ferocity which undermines our democracy and rule of law and has an objectionable personal life style. A man who, by any normal standards, is unfit to rule.
What does this man do? In the aftermath of serious xenophobic violence nogal, he puts the blame for all the ills in the country - including those caused by himself, his government and his party - on the whites.
As for himself, like Miss Piggy used to say with great amazement, Moi? Has Moi done something wrong? It is “the others” whom we do not name who cause the power outages and the deterioration of the roads and clean water supply, who are responsible for crime, unemployment and poverty, and so on.
Now it would be wrong to deny the undeniable: of course colonialism and apartheid - “the others”, if you like - laid a skewed foundation for the post-apartheid South Africa which dogs our country still. Of course the ANC government started off with huge problems in 1994, issues which would have been an enormous challenge to even the wisest leader.
One has to take this into account when evaluating government's record during the past 21 years.
But there is also a flip side to the coin. The ANC started off with the best infrastructure in Africa, even if it was skewed towards the white population. It was a very good foundation on which to build.
But what has happened? Many roads are not properly maintained. Even though Cabinet was warned in 1998 that new power plants had to be built, they sat on their hands until 2006, with the result that the country is experiencing a debilitating electricity crisis. And it seems that the provision of clean water in many rural municipalities is going down the drain, so to speak.
Are these problems, and others, the fault of “the others”? Didn’t “the others” hand over power in 1994, and didn’t these problems really take off after that? Didn’t government completely neglect to maintain the infrastructure?
Near-weekly corruption scandals
And, perhaps most importantly, are the corruption scandals which are being uncovered almost weekly by the media the fault of “the others”, or are those in power responsible?
Against this background ElBaradei’s speech came as a welcome breath of fresh air. He did not deny that the colonial past as such was responsible for many of the ills confronting our country. But what he basically said was: stop hiding behind the past to deny your own mistakes. Start taking responsibility for what is going wrong right now.
When the ANC took over in 1994 many whites, including myself, were hopeful. After all, many ANC leaders in exile lived in African countries where they saw with their own eyes how these were run down. They knew the mistakes made and, so we expected, would be wise enough to avoid them.
Under president Nelson Mandela’s wise leadership we had reason to continue our optimism, even though with hindsight the rot set in even then. The deterioration gathered momentum in the time of Thabo Mbeki and his African nationalist, blinkered refusal to countenance the possibility that Africans could make mistakes.
But even Mbeki was a saint compared to the present club. Even in Mandela’s time, membership of the right party, the ANC, mattered when patronage was dished out. Now you have to have the right skin colour and support the right faction of the right party. Characteristics like honesty, capacity for hard work and competency do not matter.
Looking at South Africa from the outside, I am very much afraid for the future of my mother country. And that is bad, for I love my country dearly.
* Leopold Scholtz is an independent political analyst who lives in Europe. Views expressed are his own.