MICHAEL MORRIS: Bringing about a new ‘new SA’ requires planning and a steely resolve - BusinessLIVE

Michael Morris

As the ANC swirls ever faster into the vortex of oblivion that is, remarkably enough, entirely of its own making, the remainder of SA  — which is actually the majority today — must steel itself to think all the more seriously about the daunting task ahead: how to fix the damage that has been inflicted since 1994.  

We can be thankful that the last racial nationalist disaster ended in a transition that delivered a constitutional democracy whose dividend since 1994 has been immeasurable, and whose greatest worth could well be proved in our post “liberation-era” future.

(It’s one of the perverse costs of ANC misgovernance that the unimaginative and unobservant are so easily misled into regarding the mounting failure of the governing party as a failure of democracy itself, a falsity fortunately entertained only by the dumb and the lazy.)

But if the long-overdue collapse of the National Party led ultimately to the endowments of 1994 — equality, dignity and constitutionalism — the collapse of the ANC will not likely prove as generous, and it would be too much to assume that our young democracy could, on its own, guarantee solutions to the dysfunction that has been allowed to become pervasive.

If ever a “new SA” (remember the heady days when that phrase captured our rational optimism?) was called for, it is now. It will require much careful planning, and steely resolve in implementing new approaches to everything from schooling and power supply to fighting crime and staffing the state. While only a few will be engaged in this intensive, programmatic activity, the burden of a greater duty of sorts falls far more widely.

I believe Business Day editor-in-chief Alexander Parker captured the scale and nature of this task last week (“Rama-drama is just the latest manifestation of our crisis-in-perpetuity”, December 5) when he wrote: “It will require a new way of thinking about how to run a country that involves actually worrying about running the country. In our paroxysm of national anxiety it is not OK that nobody is talking about the economy when we are in such trouble ... (or) that we are not worrying about the state of our schools, and ... that there is no discussion about the fear women and children, in particular, live under in this country. This is what actually matters, and it is all that matters.”

(Parker surely speaks for most in concluding that “I don’t see a soul at the top of any of the ANC’s lists who seems to be interested in talking about [the only things that really matter].)

Higher up in his piece Parker likened living in SA to competing in a survival reality show, where basic needs demand urgent attention and “(we) don’t really have time to consider the circumstances that led us here”.

This line was especially resonant for me, having written in my last column about events a century-and-a-half ago, ending — perhaps a tad cryptically — with a reference to the disruptive arrival of industrial capitalism through mining, and the looming presence of Cecil Rhodes.

Days later I was intrigued to read veteran columnist Shawn Hagedorn’s observation that “many of today’s most dynamic economies are former colonies”. Of this, he writes: “Their impressive successes followed colonialism’s uprooting of conventions which were becoming outdated. Perhaps colonialism should be categorised as a particularly ugly phase among a long series of highly disruptive industrial-era advances.”

And it strikes me that taking these unabashed insights as a point of departure could start an enormously helpful conversation about making a “new” new SA.

• Morris is head of media at the SA Institute of Race Relations.

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2022-12-12-michael-morris-bringing-about-a-new-new-sa-requires-planning-and-a-steely-resolve/