While April 27, 1994 is still undoubtedly the most important day in the modern history of our country, the time has come to take honest stock of the gains of 1994, writes Vukani Mde.
Cape Town - South Africans mark Freedom Day today in a country much changed from that of 1994.
While April 27, 1994 is still undoubtedly the most important day in the modern history of our country, the time has come to take honest stock of the gains of 1994.
It has become commonplace to assert that while South Africa experienced a political sea change in 1994, the economic underpinnings of apartheid have hardly shifted, leaving us with an incomplete revolution and, some warn, perched atop a ticking time bomb.
Inequality is on the march, and racial inequality has hardly been shifted by the gradual emergence of a black middle class.
This week the Commission for Employment Equity revealed that whites still hold nearly 70 percent of all top management and 60 percent of senior management positions in the private sector economy, despite being less than 10 percent of the economically active population.
The average black household still earns about a sixth (R70 000) of the annual income of the average white household (R387 000).
Nor have significant dents been made against unemployment and poverty.
Recent statistics show that some 12 million people live in extreme poverty, and we still have the highest rates of unemployment of any nation that is not a war-ravaged basket case.
These stats also do not escape from the racially defined distribution of misery that we inherited from apartheid.
“White” unemployment is below 8 percent, while the majority black population lives with a 40 percent rate of joblessness.
South Africans could just about tolerate the glacial pace of economic change while they believed that, politically at least, they were building a solid democracy that could withstand most tests. In 2016, they are confronted by realities that put even the narrative of the “political miracle” under severe strain.
Racism is not gone, neither in its structural nor its interpersonal dimensions. Our constitutional order is under strain, as evidence grows that the man elected to the country’s highest office neither understands nor respects the constitution we adopted almost exactly 20 years ago.
But, while we may have a defective president, there have been widespread calls for his resignation or removal - even from within the ANC and its elders.
And the sky hasn’t fallen, no one has been hauled off to prison. Everyone is free to say what they like, just as the Cape Times is free to write what it likes.
The South Africa of 2016 is at a delicate crossroad. We should by all means celebrate the triumph of 1994 today, but we would do better to honour that triumph by being more vocal and more active in combating the regression and stagnation that threatens it all.
And while we’re doing that, we should be mindful that the eyes of the world are on us. Millions around the world look up to us as they too seek their liberation from oppression. For instance, yesterday the long-suffering people of Palestine unveiled a 6m statue of democratic South Africa’s founding president, Nelson Mandela, in honour of our triumph over apartheid and our Freedom Day.
It was our Madiba who put it very plainly: “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
We dare not disappoint them. We dare not disappoint all our children.
Cape Times