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“HOW bad is this country’s political and economic state of affairs, really?”
This is the question that senior correspondents like this writer has asked more intensely this week.
Concerned South Africans have diverse motives for asking this question and often ask it with an intense sense of urgency.
Each news event in South Africa triggered a new set of questions this week.
Three incidents have elicited questions about the future of this country.
The first incident was the explosive student anger which gripped the country. Students demonstrated against an expected 10.5% surge in tuition fees at the universities in Johannesburg, Potchefstroom, Grahamstown, Cape Town, Pretoria and Durban.
The second event was around the medium-term budget speech by the finance minister, Nhlanhla Nene, who painted a gloomy picture for the country’s future economy.
He said treasury now expected growth of just 1.5% for this year and 1.7% for next year. These were lower than the figures he released in his budget speech earlier this year.
The third incident was the Communication Workers Union’s (CWU) allegation that it had confirmed that its members at the South African Post Office (Sapo) had been told they'll receive only half their salaries today and the rest at the end of the month.
On the question of student protests, concerned South African citizens have asked: Is this student rage a sign of a new, more terrifying era in the country?
Also, does this anger take the country back to an era similar to the time when former President PW Botha made the Rubicon speech at the National Party Congress in Durban in 1985? This speech deepened the students struggle against apartheid in the township schools and universities. It also saw an increase in state repression.
Nene’s statements prompted the questions: Does this mean the country is on the verge of a recession? Will the recession be as bad as it was in the 2007-2009 global financial meltdown?
On the last event the question is: Does this mean other parastatals will follow suit, rendering the country’s economic outlook terribly miserable?
How bad are things really? They’re not bad as yet, I must assert.
It’s probably normal and even correct for a country like South Africa to measure its recent incidents against its own history.
The setback with South Africa is that its history sets a nasty low bar. But a lot has changed in the past 21 years since the first all-race democratic elections were held.
Today, hundreds of thousands of people are not being detained without trial. So, no, it’s not the 1985 period, at least not yet.
Unlike the PW Botha era, South Africa is not run by means of total terror. It is, rather, a country that sounds like a totalitarian one when you read some newspapers or even listen to most of its citizens. But it is far from this.
Despite the economic downturn, large South African cities like Sandton, Cape Town and Durban have not lost their luster of prosperity yet.
Frightening and heartbreaking as the post office matter is for anyone who works for the government, it likely marks yet another step in a slow descent rather than a fall into a bottomless pit.
South Africans know — and some actually remember — that things were indeed terrible in the country before.
The problem with that knowledge, and with the questions that come from it, is that it can make life in South Africa seem tolerable in comparison to the apartheid period.
