Many years ago, as a medical student in Ibadan, the caption of a photograph published in the Newsweek caught your eye. It has stayed with you ever since. Newsweek and Time, American weekly news magazines, were must-reads, even if it meant you might be left with not enough money to go to the cafeteria at mealtime. The photograph was of a black policeman training his gun on a group of black protesters during one of the deadly street riots that characterised the apartheid era.
“Those people there” he said to the reporter, “they have lost their head”.
The black policeman was a symbol of apartheid, deliberately chosen by Newsweek to show it was not about Race. Of course, it was all about Race.
Newsweek was a right-of-centre publication that subtly favoured the apartheid state. Time magazine was more middle ground. Neither magazines, in those days, believed black Africans would ever rule South Africa.
The events of the past few days in SA have burst the bubble of anyone who might have taken a cue from Mandela and believed that the repressed energy of a “born again” SA – the Rainbow Nation – would soon help to galvanise Africa to a place of prominence in the modern world.
Everyone understood there would be problems. Virtually all the land and all the wealth in the land were in the hands of the erstwhile white oppressor, now transformed into fellow citizens. The entire black race had grown up in overcrowded townships and settlements where the very fabric of society was worn thin by poverty and a lack of hope. Girls had children by three different men by the time they were eighteen. Violence was rife, and life was cheap. Death could come anytime, from the police or the casual street criminal.
The change would take time, everyone said. Madiba occupied himself with setting the tone. Purpose. Education. Hard work. Collaboration. Perhaps even – dare one say the word, love!
Black empowerment. Black faces began to show up in board rooms. Black behemoths, rich as Croesus, emerged in Finance and Mining. Tokyo Sexwale. Cyril Ramaphosa.
The low-hanging fruit of a common love for sport was plucked. World championship here and there. Heady moments on sweaty afternoons when the national flag fluttered in the wind and celebration erupted from Soweto to Pietermaritzburg.
The myth has been unravelling in bits and pieces since.
It is a sad spectacle. And it is and pathetic that Mandela’s golden boy, the one with the brains and street-cred, unlike his predecessors – Cyril Ramaphosa –, is holding carrying the can and superintending over the meltdown
The new message on the Facebook wall of Dennis, for you, carries a sad symbolism. Dennis is a Boer friend of yours, a short, crusty man you got to know when you ran a busy public hospital and he headed the team contracted to manage the facility. An extremely efficient man who has fallen in love with Lagos – his family is in SA, and he is old enough to retire to a life of barbecues and outdoor macho activities that are the staple of his race, but he is always finding his way back to Lagos.
You have a nagging suspicion that there is a Lagos babe tucked away in Ikeja somewhere who has his heart on a leash, and you always tease him about this. He is the most versatile technician you have ever known, and a jolly good fellow besides.
His Facebook page has a picture of Cyril Ramaphosa, with his hands up in the air. The message across the picture reads, “I’m f***ing things up as fast as I can.”
It is sad that in 2019 what might otherwise have been dismissed as Afrikaner sour-grapes is becoming emblematic of the state as the Rainbow Nation.
South Africa is letting itself down.
It is a sad spectacle and pathetic that Mandela’s golden boy, the one with the brains and street-cred, unlike his predecessors – Cyril Ramaphosa – is carrying the can and superintending over the meltdown.
On Cyril’s watch, the economy has tanked, corruption is still rife, and rampart xenophobia has become virtually the official party slogan of the once noble, multi-cultural ANC. The ugly truth is that not only taxi drivers, not only uneducated Zulu tenants of single-sex miners’ hostels, not only jealous township dwellers, but also government ministers and city officials are projecting the blame for the failures of their society and their government’s ineptitude on other Africans living in their land – Nigerians, Ethiopians, Zimbabweans, Mozambicans.
They are taking their jobs and taking their women. They are running thriving commercial ventures in neighbourhoods where the indigenes are wallowing in poverty. They are responsible for drugs and prostitution.
Yes, it is true that there are Nigerian criminal gangs. But it is the duty of the government to govern. Where the government has failed and a country becomes famous as the murder and rape capital of the world, it cannot be foreigners – it is the government. The government controls the borders, the police and all organs of law enforcement. The government reserves the right to turn back or let in any persons at its borders and to detect, punish and deport anyone who violates its law.
Failure cannot be explained away by the psychological defence mechanism of “projection”, tarring “everyone else” with the same brush.
Everyone had thought Cyril would come to power with a masterplan and a new vision for his country, and that by now he would be building liveable cities, educating, disarming and re-humanising the townships, eliminating single-sex hostels and insisting that families live together, and dismantling the hostile war mentality that got his people through Apartheid but is crippling their ability to survive in a normal world.
But so far it has been more of the same.
Beyond the inter-governmental platitudes that will douse the present tensions and restore “normalcy”, Cyril Ramaphosa will have to dig deep, do the vision thing and raise his game.
Can he? It is an indication of how quickly he has plummeted in the eyes of those who once admired him that the answer is not a resounding “YES”.
