The grim state of South Africa one year after Nelson Mandela

 Cape Town

Nelson Mandela was so much the father of our new democracy that when he died a year ago South Africans felt like orphans. The joyful moment when he became our president 20 years ago has been replaced with a sombre mood now. South Africa has political stability, a fairly healthy democracy and has lifted millions of her people from the lowest rungs of poverty, but economic growth has been pitifully low, unemployment is at 37 per cent, and dreadful levels of violent crime terrorise the whole population, particularly the poor. The education of black children is among the worst on earth. The civil service, central and local, is bloated, incompetent and corrupt. State hospitals, state electricity supply and the state airline are failing. The ANC is as obsessed with race as the apartheid government was, and with the same disastrous consequences.

The myth that the African National Congress overcame apartheid by armed struggle is nonsense. So is another myth, now prevalent, that ANC rule under Nelson Mandela was a golden age but that the ANC has subsequently fallen from grace. Mandela was indeed a great man, whose generosity of spirit brought peace to an anxious nation, but he was not a great president. He took little interest in the economy and deferred practical matters to others, including ideologues and crooks. His successor, Thabo Mbeki, ruling from 1999 to 2008, was a neurotic racist with intellectual pretensions. Like Robert Mugabe, he worshipped everything European while deeply resenting it. His racism led him to believe that Aids, then decimating the black population, was caused not by the HIV virus but by some sort of imperialist machination. His denial is estimated to have cost 300,000 lives, nearly all black. (Today 11 per cent of South Africans are infected with HIV.