My goodness, that was close. 179 votes separated us from where we are now and economic desolation. Whilst one doesn’t want to appear overly dramatic, I don’t think many South Africans realised just how close we came to taking a fundamentally irreversible road towards terminal economic decline.
There seems to be a fair amount of commentary around whether or not Cyril Ramaphosa, given his somewhat compromised top six, is going to be able to achieve what we as a country so desperately need. For what it is worth, my money is absolutely on him succeeding. In fact, just his victory has already achieved so much, and I think we are too quick to forget last year’s feelings of constant anxiety (and at times nausea).
Whilst we had been in decline for some time, our descent really accelerated when the President removed Pravin Gordhan last year, effectively going rogue and rushing us unashamedly head-on into total state capture and potentially an entirely unnecessary and possibly bankrupting nuclear deal. From there on things deteriorated fast economically. Business investment virtually froze completely, growth slowed and would have collapsed if not for agriculture; tax revenues started drying up; and our state-owned enterprises were on the brink of collapse, wounded significantly by mismanagement and bleeding capital profusely, in favour always of the same few names. Unemployment was rocketing (which means crime rockets too), and confidence was at 40-year lows (back to apartheid days), as we stumbled from one downgrade to the next, proceeding towards further irreversible national bankruptcy by the day, knowing that with the old crew in charge, the only way forward was down.
