For much of the first fifteen years of post-1994 South Africa, the leadership of how its democracy was established captivated the world’s imagination. Other countries looked on enviously as South Africa became the beacon of hope about the possibility of a successful democratic order based on universal principles of good government as manifest in free and fair elections, the supremacy of the Constitution and the rule of law, an independent judiciary, unfettered operation of a free market system, and guarantee of the apex human freedoms of association, assembly, and speech, including movement and property rights. South Africa was vaulting effortlessly from the status of a nation mired in a race and class-induced conflict into one that was rising as an open society filled with the hope of a better life for all. Anchored by the reconciliation dividends of the inaugural Mandela Presidency and a Kofi Annan-led United Nations Organisation's commitment to nurturing an African success as a counter-narrative to what the world has been used to, in respect of post-liberation struggle governments.
It was during this era that South Africa was endowed with an economy that had as commanding heights some of Africa's largest energy, logistics, rail network, armament manufacturing, information technology companies; a sophisticated financial services sector; a stock exchange whose liquidity was anchored by a locally investing government employees pension fund and related risk and obligatory savings based funds. In addition, South Africa had an adequately branded and professionally run national airline, and some of Africa's leading manufacturing conurbations in Rosslyn, Ekhurhuleni, Ethekwini, and Port Elizabeth as anchor assets to its economy.
Poised to become a global player in many respects, South Africa would demonstrate the soft aspects of its arrival on the global stage through its prowess in Rugby, Soccer, Netball, Swimming, Athletics, Cricket, and other boutique specialist sporting quotes demonstrating the depth of lifestyle congruency with its economic potential. Global ideation conferences and knowledge translation spaces started to project a South Africa that was contributing to global theoretical constructs practice and on-site laboratories for simulation of the transitional government, truth and reconciliation, demutualization of compact liquid financial assets, conversion of anti-apartheid coalitions in multilateral constructs to manage diplomatic relations, use of national icons as soft power nodal points, and self-imposed structural adjustments as construed by its in-country debt borrowing prowess. In addition to this benchmark, performances were South Africa's conceptualization, as the lead in a continental collective, of the New Partnership for Africa's Development and its implementation units such as the African Peer Review Mechanism and many other private sector-led initiatives that created a network of node entrepreneurs and industrialists that shaped an approach to development. Attempts at establishing a one billion dollar strong Pan African Infrastructure Development Fund initiative led by South Africa's Public Investment Corporation's then CEO yielded and consequential to the initiative funds such as the South Africa-based Harith Fund.
These were all trappings of a society poised to be a regional influencer of note. But then came Africa's epidemics of greed and corruption, low key tribalism laced discontents with the governing elite, growing distrust by the economic establishment of the economic transformation intents of the governing ANC, sins of incumbency by an ascending bureaucratic class, and the chronic belief in personalities as institutions of leadership instead of systems. In this vortex, class apartheid developed into a new substrate that would create not only political factions in most political parties but recalibrated in-country private sector investment to be more about shareholder value than social investment base expansion, the consequence of which became less and less investment in manufacturing and more import and consumption-based economic growth whose impact is now an economy with liquidity that has no absorptive capacity to its unemployed and school leaving youth. South Africa's prospects of becoming a beacon of a public-private partnership led developmental state ground to a halt and almost gotten to a standstill as the contest for its political economy became ideationalised through the prism of the state and its revenue as the primary source of investment.
The rise of leadership that saw the state as the economy, the state as the command center of private-sector behavior, the state as a domain of kleptocratic practices such as outright capture of its executive and accountability authority spaces, the state as the dispenser of a social security system which is not part of an economic growth strategy, compounded the impact of the epidemics. By the time the practice of recalling Presidents and thus interfering with the base flow of systems and bureaucratic cadence of South Africa's democracy, the world, and more notably its foreign direct investment community had already turned its attention away from South Africa, save for volatile markets investors in the forex and currency domains of trading, and purely for its risk-based returns, in short gambling. In the global west, South Africa's governing ANC had been losing ground as a trusted partner to the declining global liberal order, instead, individuals inside it became 'jockeys to bet on.'
Through its BRICS escapades, South Africa clamored to reappear as an 'on stage partner' rather than 'in the scene actor', in an unfolding geopolitical positioning global democratic drama to predominate trade between regional power blocs. Punching as a Continental representative in Brics, its weight would compromise its diplomatic standing with 'certain' of needed continental partners. The sophistication of China, in particular, would later show how junior a partner South Africa was in the BRICS scheme of things. China's quest to predominate infrastructure funding of Africa in the parlance of the 'frozen' Pan African Infrastructure Development Fund would be packaged to propel a narrative that the 'BRICS' Bank is an alternative to other funds. As China was buttressing South Africa's diplomatic ego, it pursued a strategy of one on one engagement on those South Africa would have led and pioneered, key amongst these was being at the center of the infrastructure revolution with which African countries could be accelerated through other previous phases of the industrial revolution it never went through.
Meanwhile, aspirant transitioning economies, particularly in Africa, have also started to look toward South Africa, as they sought to consolidate their geopolitical statuses. After all, with its fairly industrialized economy, the sizable pool of financial services sector skills base to anchor its liquidity, and vast reservoir of recently graduated from one of the most sophisticated global campaigns against apartheid diplomats that understood global nodes of economic influence, South Africa seems well suited to produce a globally integrated economic growth miracle. All this has left many asking: can the Tambo-Mandela-Mbeki global connectedness yield a dividend for South Africa and the continent like the post-second world war Smuts dividend did for a post-1948 Apartheid State.
This question has been far more difficult to answer, as some of the recent economic data suggest. Without a doubt, South Africa has made impressive recent progress in building the hardware of constitutional democracy success—its liberal democracy infrastructure, its ability to provide tangible experiences of basic human rights to its population, and its strong base of skilled civil society led monitoring of potential excesses associated with the post-liberation prerogative government. Yet at the same time, the country continues to struggle to fix its software, of national cohesion and the requisite patriotism to undergird a nationalist growth and development program. The abruptness at which policies were changed and rules being altered to favor the 'oligarchic' behavior of an emerging establishment became a liability that began a process of choking the crank interfaces of nation-building and economic prosperity. As a result, the pre-1994 establishment with its massive factor endowments and institutional memory of growth levers that the economy required, and their foreign networks grew reluctant to undertake the investment journeys needed to propel South Africa's latent global competitiveness. Whether South Africa manages to reach pre-anti apartheid sanctions and immediate post constitution adoption boom years again and become a serious global player will depend on whether the country can finally overcome the long-standing defects in its policy implementation systems, and how its leadership understands itself as being part of an institution that should lead society than society being always vulnerable to its politico-emotional-intelligence deficiencies. CUT!!!
🤷🏽♂️A ndzo titsalela makwerhu
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