'Oh my, the beloved country'.

Oh my, the beloved country!

South Africa and I parted company 40 years ago. My reasons were personal and political and are not the subject of this article. A while back, however, I started making annual visits. At first, very little had changed to persuade me to re-evaluate my reasons for leaving. If anything, my motivations in 1973 seemed even more justifiable.

When Mandela was freed, hope surged. As I know it did for all South Africans (and the world.) What I want to write about now is whether recent experiences give me any sense that the hope was fulfilled.

I’ve just spent two months in ‘the rainbow nation’. Almost all of this time was spent in Cape Town. Some would argue, with justification, that the western Cape is not a microcosm of the country as a whole (for one, it has the best provincial administration) but I submit that my view of the nation is as optimistic as it can be, given that it‘s a snapshot taken from the best ‘performing’ of the five provinces.

Let me start with what has not changed. Two elements stand out: one the staggering beauty of the country and two, the warmth and embracing nature of all its people. I now live in America and, in a heart beat, I would exchange the relaxed ‘howzit?’ of a white South African or the friendliness of an African, for many of their US counterparts. There’s something about the South African ‘joie de vivre’ that lifts the heart. There are good people at work here.

I met a young man whose team is running market research programs in several African countries. With a brilliant female architect who is working with provincial government, I visited a number of handsome civic buildings she had designed in the Cape township of Khayelitsha. I met a farming family that has diversified into making cheeses; their products bring home international awards. I know of an Englishwoman who came here a few years ago, adopted two African children, and now runs a charity that delivers health and educational resources to the children of vineyard workers. A young American, who  comes from my village in New York state, visits here for months at a time; in crime-infested Crossroads township, he teaches young black kids the skills of basketball. 

All these entrepreneurs add vitality and hope to the local scene. Are they fearful of the future? They are realists: one family, recently returned from ‘sanitized’ Australia, summed up their feelings this way: ‘we only have one life, so you may as well feel the marrow in your bone and not just the wash of multiple shades of vanilla’.

Sadly, the beauty of the land, the energy of most people, and the successes of a few entrepreneurs, are the only positive features I found on this visit to the sun-splashed country I love.

In the shadows, I detected widespread disappointment. There’s dismay – even resentment - among people of every color at the inability of the government to deliver on its promises. There’s a sense  - as Archbishop Tutu is said to have said some years ago – that ‘the gravy train only stopped to change passengers’.

Incompetence and corruption seem to be the defining features of South African governance. Yet, paradoxically, the ruling ANC party still pulls 62 percent of the vote. So, what causes this cognitive dissonance? I detected a number of issues at play.

The ANC runs provincial government in all provinces except the highly effective Western Cape. They are desperate to win control of the Cape in the next local elections. One of their tactics, I’m told, has been to encourage compliant media ownership. To many readers, the Cape Times, a morning newspaper covering Cape Town (‘the mother city’), is judged to have become blatantly in thrall to the ANC party line. In recent weeks, a flurry of letters to the editor has accused the management of influencing a policy ‘to fuel the hatred among the races’. The newspaper recently released six of its white columnists and appointed black and mixed-race journalists, considered by some to be less experienced, because they were were ‘more in tune with the future’. Any casual reader could see that the paper nowadays is filled with ‘puff pieces’ from various government sources. The paper often runs pictures and fawning articles on its front page about its owner, Dr. Iqbal Serve. Serve happens to be a confidant of president Zuma.

A topic of more national import is – as someone described it to me - ‘affirmative action on steroids’ or ‘reverse discrimination’. A recent newspaper headline, ‘Half Bok team must be black’, referred to the Springboks, the national rugby team. The national rugby chief believes ‘we have got to do our duty in terms of transformation’ and implies that coaches are selecting heavier white players over lighter black players. Talent, speed, and ability, the usual yardsticks of potential, seem now to be less important than being of light weight. Many South Africans see this as a policy to make game winning potential secondary to racial ideology.

After 300 years of legislated inequality by whites on blacks, South African whites that are not self-employed - but dependent on others for their employment - are bitter at finding that they are now the ones being discriminated against. Whites agree when I point out that, after three centuries of discrimination, some balancing of the books is bound to occur. Yet they qualify their acceptance of the situation by saying ‘if only the people who get the jobs were competent’.  It is true that many public services are in disarray: the post office, telecommunications, power supplies, national pensions, passport applications. What seems inescapable to me is that these situations of sputtering public service, are a direct consequence of the apartheid era. Why? Because the previous nationalist government failed to train Africans for anything other than menial (domestic servants, cleaners) or manual labor (construction, diamond and gold mining) jobs. That karma is now back to disrupt everyone’s daily life.

Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd, Afrikaner prime minister and the architect of apartheid, once declared that blacks were born to be ‘hewers of wood and carriers of water’. It was his government that decreed where people should live (Group Areas Act), which jobs they would be allowed to have (Job Reservation legislation) and with whom they could - to put it politely - fraternize (Immorality Act).  It is, indeed, payback time.

This embedded incompetence, however much justified by the past, dilutes the spirit of many South Africans, regardless of color. A mixed- race engineer was told that his job application was rejected because he was ‘not black enough’. Some African garage attendants just laughed when I asked them what they thought of their president ‘He’s always smiling because he steals from us and we can't catch him!’ Yet African children I questioned admire Jacob Zuma ‘He is like us and he is now the boss!’ they told me.

In a country village in the dusty Karoo, a white female worker put it to me this way. “When I visited America to see my daughter – all my children have left here – I got a fantastic sense of how proud Americans are about their country. Yet here, our national motto of ‘Proudly South African’ is a joke; how can you be proud when the president is stealing from taxpayers to build Nkandla, his retirement home? How can you be proud when we have power failures and our national airline is bust, and broadcasting chiefs plus dozens of other government officials, are under suspicion of malpractice? How can you be proud when, after 20 years in power, our politicians are still blaming our failures on the legacy of apartheid?”

So opinions are mixed about the man who leads the industrial powerhouse (with occasional brown-outs) at the foot of this continent. Some commentators go as far as to say that president Zuma, per Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, is trying to entrench as president-for-life. They wonder why their president recently spent a vacation with another president-for-life, Vladimir Putin. Other sources tell me that ‘Zuma can't afford not to be president. With four wives and twenty acknowledged children, the man has a budget entry for spousal support as a perquisite of office. It's a job he has to keep.’

Yet what about the lifestyle of ordinary white people? I said to another citizen that the status of white South Africans didn't seem to have changed much. He smiled. ‘Sure, we’re still traveling first-class but now we’re on the Titanic’. But he asked me to remember that, in a country of 54M of which 4.5m are white, the largest percentage of tax revenue comes from the white sector (white people earn about five times as much as black people). There are 17m ‘indigent’ blacks in South Africa and the government gives them the equivalent of US$95 per month in support. Although there are 13.7m registered taxpayers, only 5m submitted tax returns in 2013. So, most whites feel that they are doing their bit for the country. ‘Essentially, we are carrying the unemployed and the unemployable’ said my source.

At street level, I don't see much improvement. What I do see is: tramps sorting through rubbish bins; poor whites standing at traffic lights with begging notices; criminals living on hillsides and attacking unwary hikers on Table Mountain; the walls of every home spiked with barbed wire. What I don’t see is any sign of law enforcement. I’ve lived in a number of cities but nowhere have I seen drivers ignoring red lights as they do in South Africa. Recently, at a pedestrian crossing, I was nearly hit by a security van driving through a red light. Vigorous but fair law enforcement is a symbol of good government; the lack of it is evidence of a failing state. Small time anarchy is flourishing here.

Yet tourists love the beloved country! Tourism is the chief growth engine in the western Cape. It’s a beautiful place and with the Rand so puny, it’s cheap to visit. As they say in New York ‘what’s not to like?’ Restaurants, many in fabulous settings, are plentiful and mostly serve world-class food. Service, however, is glacially slow. Management’s enforcement of fast, accurate service – like police enforcement – is severely lacking. I’ve dined at 25 restaurants in nine weeks (like I said, it's cheap on dollars) and only twice did a manager walk up to our table to ask if we were satisfied. So I never blame the servers; they’re victims of poor training and supervision.

The impression I take away this year is that South Africans are shrugging at their nation’s dysfunction. (And let’s not forget that only nine percent of Americans think that their congress is doing a decent job.) The majority of citizens here – as in America, as in the world – treat their self-serving politicians with derision. People just try to get on with their lives.

South Africans seem to have accepted that this is how Africa works. They’re all passengers in a stolen car that’s steered by a learner driver who seems to treat his incompetence as a bit of a laugh. But the countryside is vivid with sunshine and the sky is blue. Sure, the car breaks down a lot but, hey, that comes with the territory.

I only hope, for their sakes, that the car soon stops going downhill.

© Brian Clewly Johnson

Cape Town, March 2015.