Without Madiba, we know it’s now time for South Africa to find its own way, says Murray Williams.
Cape Town - The week between Christmas and New Year has a particular feel. It has its laid-back character, with the year finally done, but with the first sniff of the New Year too.
For the fortunate, the past weeks will have been rich with blessings – food and drink, shopping and presents. Being treated like kids.
But many will have started, too, thinking about their future, and those promises they will make to themselves on Tuesday night – their New Year’s resolutions.
For those who are today lying prone on a lounger, in the shade of the afternoon sun after December’s excesses, it’s usually simple: Diet! Drink less, gym more, get up earlier, walk more/drive less, read more/less TV, and so on.
Looking ahead, one usually wonders, equally, about South Africa’s year to come.
About New Year’s resolutions as a nation.
But this New Year’s Day is new territory, in at least one respect: Nelson Mandela has left us. And while his death was no surprise, he has left a profound sense of there being a vacuum.
So long as Mandela was alive, even as he retreated into a fragile old age, South Africa still somehow relied upon him, as if saying, collectively, in all 11 of our official tongues: “So long as you’re with us, Tata Madiba, we’ll be fine.”
With Madiba at the head of the household, the world would treat us okay.
But on Wednesday morning, South Africa starts the year without its trusted, beloved head of the family. So on this particular New Year’s Day, South Africa will be less like a happy-go-lucky, much-loved kid, and more like a young student on her or his first day at university – without, for the first time, parents’ guiding hands or the familiarity of school.
Alone on this new campus, this student will now have to make some tough New Year’s resolutions entirely alone for the first time – as we do as a country.
Without the staggering power of Madiba, we’re just one student in a very big international class.
That “feeling alone” can be terrifying. The young adult still retains the warm memories of adolescence, but knows it’s now solely up to her or him to make the future happen.
As a country, South Africa retains “The Rainbow Nation” that the Arch, Madiba and a generation of Struggle leaders gave us, but we know it’s now time to find our own way.
And to achieve what we want to, we will need to ask ourselves some exceptionally difficult questions, make super-tough decisions, and then find iron will to see them to fruition, like any successful resolutions.
That young student’s New Year’s resolutions may be: to develop crucial skills, to build a powerful network, to seek out life-long mentors, and to become financially secure.
Fewer parties, more discipline. Less dreaming, more pure hard work.
On this New Year’s Eve, South Africa’s resolutions are near-identical. So we ask ourselves:
* Are we doing enough to educate and train the next generation of South Africans properly, as our single most important priority?
* Are we, as a nation, winning international confidence, trust and respect?
* Are our most senior leaders the very best people to steer our ship?
* And are we destined to prosper, or go belly-up?
January 1, 2014, will in many ways be a brave new world. South Africa is now out of its teens and faces a grown-up world.
Like the student, we’ll have to grow up. Fast.
On our own for the first time, will we pass, or fail?
* Murray Williams’s column Shooting from the Lip appears in the Cape Argus every Friday. Follow him on Twitter: @mwdeadline
Cape Argus