And though the last few weeks have shown hints of optimism — the hostages are home, and Gaza is free from the buzz of IDF drones — the Holy Land’s basic problems feel just as intractable. Whatever Donald Trump might claim, this truth can ultimately be encapsulated in his deal’s very last line. “The United States will establish a dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians,” the document proclaims, “to agree on a political horizon for peaceful and prosperous co-existence.” This, after all, has been the promise of peace negotiations since I was in the army — and so far they’ve achieved pretty much nothing.

We know, of course, that the current Israeli government, the most Right-wing coalition ever assembled in the nation’s history, has no intention of facilitating the creation of a Palestinian state. Long before he formed this government, in late 2022, Benjamin Netanyahu spent his entire career preventing that very possibility. As far back as his incitement against Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin during the negotiation over the Oslo Accords — which led to Rabin’s assassination in 1995 — Netanyahu has been a vehement and consistent enemy of Palestinian statehood.

As recently as 6 October 2023, indeed, Netanyahu thought he could “manage the occupation” rather than putting an end to it through a political compromise. Hamas’s massacre the following day smashed that idea. But even if it hadn’t, Netanyahu’s colleagues would still have remained, with Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich both eager to dispossess the Palestinians and annex certainly the West Bank if not Gaza too. Either way, the triumvirate aspires to a very different future from that envisioned in the Trump plan Netanyahu has reluctantly endorsed.

If, as some fear, the Prime Minister ultimately manages to derail the plan, the demolition of Gaza and the slaughter of its Palestinian population will continue, even as some Jews hope to resettle the territory themselves. Those Palestinians remaining in Gaza will be squeezed into less than a quarter of the territory and subjected to conditions resembling a cross between a ghetto and a prison camp. This is all part of the openly professed government target of “encouraging” them to leave.

As for the West Bank, once conditions in Gaza require fewer Israeli troops, the illegal and plausibly apartheid regime in place there already will accelerate the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the territory, whose initial phases include moving the rural population into the urban centers in the south; taking over and demolishing the refugee camps in the north; separating both regions from each other; and progressively turning Palestinian communities into isolated outposts. Whether or not Israel succeeds in annexing parts of the West Bank, it aims to perpetuate a sense of poverty, siege, intimidation and despair intended to similarly “encourage” Palestinians in the West Bank to quit the territory altogether.

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Gaza is the endpoint of liberal democracy

By Omer Bartov

Many decades have passed since the start of Israel’s occupation in 1967, and its transformation into a nation ruling more or less equal numbers of Palestinians and Israelis. One of developments since has been the growing dehumanization of Palestinians in the collective Jewish Israeli mind. The “social death” that Palestinians have undergone, insulated as they are behind the security barrier, means they’re encountered by Israelis only as a population to be controlled and oppressed. That becomes clear enough if you turn on the television, with one Channel 14 host claiming he doesn’t “sleep well” unless more of Gaza is flattened. Or else go on social media, with many comparing Palestinians to “Amalak”, a Biblical enemy that God commanded the Israelites to annihilate. As late as August, a Haaretz poll found that 82% of Israelis were untroubled by reports of famine in the Strip.

These societal attitudes are also reflected in law. Palestinian citizens of Israel still enjoy equal rights under Israeli law, with many pursuing successful careers from medicine to the law. Yet the Nation State Law, passed in 2018, defines Israel as the historical homeland of the Jewish people, and grants them the exclusive right to national self-determination in the country. At the core of this transformation is the gradual emergence of a thoroughgoing apartheid state, not only in the occupied territories, but increasingly in Israel proper as well. This is already manifested in the treatment of Palestinian citizens of Israel as an undesirable population that should similarly be “encouraged” to leave. As Haaretz again reports, over half of Israeli Jews now back expelling their Arab compatriots wholesale, up from 31% in 2003.

No less important, these hardening attitudes are now boomeranging back against Israeli Jews. The country’s beleaguered Attorney General and Supreme Court, seen before October 7 as the last bastions of the rule of law and civil rights for Jewish citizens, now remain silent in view of the widespread severe abuses of international law vis-à-vis Palestinians under occupation. More than that, they ignore or even condone the war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocidal actions of the IDF in Gaza. Taken together, these institutions can no longer be expected to act in defense of Jewish citizens protesting their regime’s brutalities.

In other words, if Netanyahu scuttles Trump’s plan, using his own infamous bag of tricks, and relying on Trump’s notoriously short attention span, the future of Israel — quite apart from, but also related to, the catastrophic fate of Palestinians — is dire indeed. Even before the war, secular Israeli Jews feared that the growing demographic weight and political clout of their religious compatriots would change the nature of Israeli society. Since October 7, these fears, exacerbated by intensifying messianic rhetoric and the erosion of the rule of law, as well as the deteriorating economic situation, have led thousands of young professionals and their families to leave the country, with many more considering their own migration. Certainly, this exodus won’t be counterbalanced by the influx of Jews making Aliyah from the diaspora, notwithstanding the many examples of genuine antisemitism they face in Europe and elsewhere.

If this trajectory were to continue, in the coming decades Israeli society risks changing even in such strongholds of tolerance as Tel Aviv, with Israeli nationalism focused not only on its ethnic but also on its religious Jewish identity — one which rejects all other non-orthodox versions of Judaism. Religious coercion would greatly increase, and secular, progressive, and liberal Jewish life in Israel risk diminishing into ever-more isolated enclaves. Israel may not be the next Iran, but a mix of theocracy and authoritarianism may well be the destiny for a state largely founded by secular socialist Zionists who had rebelled against what they saw as the stranglehold of backward-looking religious leaders in the diaspora.

In foreign policy, too, Israel would suffer. If it were to become the apartheid state its critics have long accused it of being, it wouldn’t be able to maintain strong economic, political, and military ties with its main European allies and the United States. It would gradually lose the support of growing parts of the diaspora: even as things stand today, around two-in-three American Jews believe Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza. None of this is helped, of course, by the claim of Israel itself — a claim disputed by many Jews living beyond its borders — that it represents the Jewish people as a collective.

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The No-State Solution

By Rajan Menon

As an increasingly unstable and feeble pariah state, Israel could continue to exist for a couple of decades: mostly, perhaps, because it may still be perceived as a strategic asset by the United States. But the weaker it got, and the more extremist it became, the less of an asset Israel would be for any rational actor in the White House. All the while, keeping down millions of occupied Palestinians would only become harder, all of which would distract from Israel’s external security. In an unstable and violent region, that’ll only make it less attractive as a strategic ally to Europe or the US.

Taken together, this is not a country that I would want to live in, nor wish for my children and grandchildren to make a life in. It would also be the very opposite of what the visionaries of Zionism, the prophets of the Haskalah — the Jewish Enlightenment — or the Jewish religious sages throughout the generations, had hoped and prayed for.

In the long run, of course, the grim reality may lead Israelis to develop a more robust civil rights movement together with their Palestinian cousins, in a country which, combined with the occupied territories, now has a population of seven million Jews and seven million Palestinians. Optimists might even suggest that this will culminate in what was called for during the heyday of the Oslo negotiations: a “state of all its citizens”. But that is far from certain, considering how oppression and racism seems sure to generate ever more extremism: whether from Hamas or hill-top settlers. We may want to believe that, eventually, Israel will go through the same process as South Africa in the early Nineties. But there is no assurance that a Mandela or a de Klerk will emerge, and even if they do, current conditions in South Africa demonstrate that dismantling apartheid does not undo the long-term damage it inflicts on society.

This is why we must hope that the vague promises and hopes expressed in Trump’s plan do end up opening the path to another future. Despite the justified cynicism and skepticism expressed by its critics, and the obvious bad-faith of many of the politicians and advisers associated with it, the President’s plan broadly points in the right direction.

It’s clear, in the end, that the Gaza Strip must be ruled by its Palestinian population, and that it must be joined with the West Bank as a single political entity: the only way it can hope to be economically viable. Once the necessity of this process is recognized, it must also be acknowledged that the Jewish and Palestinian populations of this land have no choice but to find a way to share it with equality, justice, security, and dignity for all. The goal, then, is not to determine who has a greater right on the land, or who has committed worse atrocities, or who was there first — but to devise a plan that would allow both Jews and Palestinians to rule over themselves and to live side-by-side with members of the other group.

Such a blueprint actually exists, and the vague outlines of Trump’s plan do not in any way contradict it. That blueprint, known as “A Land for All”, and previously known as “Two States, One Homeland”, was founded under joint Israeli-Palestinian leadership in 2012. Now led by the Israeli Jew May Pundak, and the Palestinian citizen of Israel, Dr Rula Hardal, the movement has variously involved journalists, scholars and activists, both Israelis and Palestinians and on both sides of the Green Line.

Overall, the plan envisions a confederation between the States of Israel and Palestine, located more or less along the 1967 borders, and based on shared principles of equality, freedom and dignity. All the while, it would distinguish between citizenship and residence: so that Israeli citizens would be allowed to live in Palestine, and Palestinian citizens would be allowed to live in Israel, as long as they respected the laws of both states. Because the infrastructure of the land on both sides of the 1967 ceasefire Green Line is so inextricably linked — true from water, to electricity, to the “972” dialcode that unites Ramallan phones with their Haifan cousins — this confederation’s institutions would have to create mechanisms for sharing resources and institutions.

In this Israel-Palestine Confederation, people would have their own national identity, and each state would enjoy the right of return for its group to be implemented as it sees fit within its own borders. But in the more distant future, the confederation, having shown that Jews and Palestinians can live productively, creatively, and safely side-by-side, may decide to transform itself into a single state of all its citizens — not through a violent struggle, but through a process of reconciliation, mutual respect and trust, and a recognition of the benefits of diversity and the creative power of fusing cultures and traditions, rather than striving to eradicate them.

Implementing this plan would require a radical change in Israeli political thinking and leadership — but also among Palestinians. Hamas is clearly no longer a plausible partner, if it ever was, meaning the only viable alternative is the Palestinian Authority based in Ramallah. But the PA is both deeply corrupt and discredited as a collaborator in the occupation. It hardly helps that, just like Hamas, the PA’s security forces have often been accused of torture, something which is incidentally also true of Israel itself.

But just as there are Jewish Israelis today who might yet be able to offer a different vision after decades of failure, so too can new Palestinian leaders emerge. Some potential leaders are currently in Israeli jails. Others are still unknown to us, or perhaps even to themselves. But once the political space for change is created, I believe that more pragmatic leaders will invariably emerge, as has happened more than once before when nations emerge from the darkness of colonialism and oppression.

If and when such a confederation is eventually created, it could become the very light to the Gentiles that some of the early and more humanistically inclined prophets of Zionism had hoped it would become. A city on a hill, not a pariah among the nations. And if you accuse me of utopianism, amid the slaughter in Gaza and the bubbling violence in the West Bank? Well, barely a century ago, the idea of a Jewish state in the Holy Land would have been dismissed as utopian too, and indeed was by Jews and non-Jews alike.

Yet as Theodor Herzl famously said, “if you will it, it will not remain a dream.” Besides, the status quo doesn’t need dreamers to condemn it: continue down this path and extremism will only grow. As for myself, I may not live long enough to see this different future, if it ever comes at all. But I pray that one day, my grandchildren, and the grandchildren of my Palestinian friends, will be able to experience the realization of that promise — and finally consign the region’s endless wars to history.

The charge misses both the target and the issue. Trump is wrong in saying there is an organized genocide of white farmers in South Africa; the real problem is the willful sacrifice of rural communities to the interests of racial ideology, a subtext to nearly everything that has occurred in South Africa since its origin.

Before the political transition in 1994, reservist army units — styled commandos in the Boer tradition, supported by a sophisticated military-area radio network and helicopter back-up — ensured stability and security in rural communities, black and white alike. As a 17-year-old conscript, I had tangential experience of the system’s workings through its rapid-response teams.

One of the first things the ANC government did when it came to power was to scrap this system. It was concerned it was too white and that it might become a basis for “counter-revolution”, despite the fact that the South African Defence Force had been the ultimate guarantor of the country’s peaceful political transition.

The state, typically, failed to replace the commandos with effective policing. Enter rural warlords, private security forces, and both black and white vigilantes, each contributing to a spiral of rural violence and counter-violence. This long trail of state failure and a mounting body count of the innocent was grist to Trump’s mill, culminating on Wednesday in the bizarre show-and-tell in the Oval Office during which Trump displayed video clips of South African opposition figures calling on supporters to “Kill The Farmer, Kill the Boer”, an old struggle chant from yesteryear, together with images of a symbolic arcade of wooden crosses representing the dead farmers.

In reality, such firebrands made up 24.1% of the vote in last year’s election, and the number of white farmers killed in the last 10 years is a fraction of the total number of South Africans slaughtered in the same period, most of them black. This is hardly compelling evidence of mass support for genocide, let alone state complicity, but still worrying in the sense that the ANC has done little to challenge the provocateurs or prosecute them for incitement, a point made by Trump to an unsettled Ramaphosa.

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Trump is no friend of the Afrikaners

By Wessie du Toit

But Trump’s J’Accuse largely missed the mark. His real target should have been the ANC’s long-standing policy of racial preferment in employment, public tenders, study opportunities and government work. This self-styled policy of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), or, as it is less generously known by its detractors, Black Extortion and Embezzlement, has seen an unrestrained flow of wealth and opportunity from the traditional wealth-creating and -holding classes into a new elite of conspicuous wealth consumers and destroyers. Nearly 150 new pieces of legislation are in the Statutes directly or indirectly based on racial profiling and preferencing in the conduct of state and private business.

The consequences for economic growth have been catastrophic. The country’s historic skills base has been either marginalized or expatriated on racial grounds, with the failing state educational and training system unable to produce substitutes, let alone replace institutional memory. Young white people who were not even born during Apartheid are penalized for the sins of their fathers, two-thirds of whom in any case voted in a referendum in 1992 to surrender power to black South Africans.

Under the guise of “empowerment” and the other weasel word, “transformation”, has arisen endemic corruption, malfeasance and incompetence. Worse, even as Ramaphosa pleads with Trump to retain or even increase American investment in South Africa, his government is doubling down on the very policies that repel the Trump administration and deter investment. It plans to employ 50 more commissars of race-based employment, and now prescribes race quotas in various sectors irrespective of skills availability. Not even Ramaphosa’s famed skills in the art of obfuscation will get him out of that inescapable contradiction.

Recently, my local civic organization asked black officials from the municipal electricity department about 40% vacancies in departmental staff. This was at a time when power infrastructure and supply were literally collapsing around us. “Do you know of 12 qualified and experienced young black women engineers available for immediate employment?” one demanded. We admitted we did not. “Well neither do we. And until we conjure them up, we cannot fill the posts.”

This insane race- and gender-based ideology would have been an infinitely more credible subject for Trump’s ambush. He might even have swotted up on a bit of recent South African history.

In 1977, as Apartheid began to wane, the US government adopted the “Sullivan Principles”, which effectively compelled US companies doing business in South Africa to ignore the race-based employment laws of the Apartheid government. They did, while the Afrikaner government turned a blind eye. As a freshman journalist in the Eastern Cape, I reported on the flowering of the trade union movements in plants such as Ford, General Motors and Goodyear. Later, together with civic organizations and the churches, they would provide the impetus for the peaceful political revolution of 1994. Meanwhile, the ANC virtue-postured in exile and waged a truly pathetic “armed struggle” long on rhetoric but with painfully few military successes.

Now it appears the Sullivan Principles may be returning to the White House. By a supreme twist of historic irony, just as the US government once enjoined US companies doing business in South Africa to stop discriminating against black people, it may now instruct them to stop penalizing white people. And, once they comply, the door is open for a wholesale abrogation of race-based laws by employers. It happened half a century ago; it could happen again.

The Bakongo tribe of Angola fashion wooden fetishes to protect the family; nails and bits of steel are driven into the wood for every familial tragedy to ward off malign spirits. And the navel of each fetish boasts a mirror to deflect malign forces. Those bizarre moments in the Oval Office this week may be regarded as South Africa’s Bakongo moment.

With the true skill of the impresario, Trump transformed South Africa’s complex issues and racial passions into simple binaries and, like the Bakongo’s mirror, reflected its malign forces. Before the world and to South Africans themselves, Trump displayed in the starkest terms the schism between the pre-modern and racist extremists of the video clips and the moderates represented by Ramaphosa’s Government of National Unity (GNU) — an arrangement forced unwillingly on him by his loss of an outright majority in last year’s election.

Here, too, was glimpsed the subtle balance of racial power in South Africa that lies hidden behind the diversionary rhetoric and the destructive race-based policies of the ruling party. It was not by chance that the majority of the South African delegation that Ramaphosa chose to bring to Washington was white. Nor that the most insightful interjection during the tableau was by John Steenhuisen, white leader of the liberal official opposition, who said the reason why his party was in the GNU, the reason why they needed US investment, was to keep out of power “the rabble” just seen on the video clips.

Trump giving Ramaphosa the Zelensky treatment has thus had an outcome, which was either intentional, if you see Trump as a Machiavellian figure, or unintentional, if you see him as a clown. Either way, it has affirmed the importance of the white minority in underpinning South Africa’s economy, bolstering Ramaphosa’s fragile GNU, and mediating between the ANC and international players — roles which the ANC’s ideologists have refused to acknowledge. It is still early days, but perhaps Trump’s theatre will force an ANC review of the policies that have enchained South Africa’s economy and dramatically interrupted the country’s long march to modernity for far too long.

Under orders from the Dutch East India Company not to antagonise the locals on whom it depended for trade, van Riebeeck restricted himself to planting a protective bitter almond hedge along the borders of his besieged encampment while continuing to negotiate with the enemy. Thus was early laid the pattern of future South African race relations: an equilibrium of teeth-gritting mutual tolerance mitigated by social distance and punctuated by sporadic violent irruptions, conquests and subjugation.

Remarkably, a single South African constitutional order emerged 340 years after van Riebeeck’s almond hedge through the Act of Union of 1910, and after another 84 years, in 1994, a functioning modern democracy. It is the one we have now, an imperfect and in many ways still teeth-gritting order, but somehow hanging together, somehow prevailing over a society where race may be the driving narrative but economic self-advancement, the consuming passion.

There have indeed been episodic attempts at creating a multi-racial system, such as the qualified enfranchisement of mixed-race people in the Cape Colony. The segregationist viewpoint, however, has long held sway: from its mildest imperial form under the famed administrator Sir Theophilus Shepstone, who created reserves in the Natal Colony for native populations in the mid-19th century, to the ruthless segregation of the Boers, who even trekked from their homes in the Eastern Cape in the early 19th century to escape what they saw as the iniquitous egalitarianism of the British.

But the policy of separation, Apartheid, was only officially crafted in 1948. Race, from then on, was no less omnipresent than it was in the previous century; it was just more complex. After the resurgent Afrikaner middle class, driven by the new Afrikaner nationalism, seized power as the National Party, a class alliance between the poor Afrikaners and poor black population was off the cards. Instead, the Afrikaner nationalists created tribal statelets in which the black population were supposed to be grateful to exercise their vote but still forced to export their labour. The scheme foundered on the implacable reefs of economic implausibility and passive African resistance.

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Ramaphosa has slain the Rainbow Nation

By Brian Pottinger

More successful was the way the National Party turned the state into a vast affirmative action engine for the working-class white population, so successful that three generations later their confident descendants, now affluent, educated and cosmopolitan, overwhelmingly voted in a referendum in March 1992 to surrender political power to the black majority, one of the few occasions in history when a dominant minority voluntarily cedes power to a dispossessed majority.

It would be pleasing to report it all turned out well in the end. It did not, or at least not as well as it could and should have. Racism, like all addictions, continually reinvents itself. In South Africa’s case it was through a corrupt political elite under the flag of the African National Congress that after gaining power in 1994 simply reversed the racism, legislatively favouring their rich black cronies and their children over all comers in jobs, educational opportunities and contracts. Nothing has exacerbated the problem of race relations in South Africa, and driven high skills abroad, as much as this policy of systemically placing race and patronage above any conceivable consideration of merit. It could not work and so, unlike their Afrikaner predecessors, the ANC failed miserably in uplifting their impoverished compatriots through a growing economy. Reverse racism proved to be a zero-sum game.

The dread price for this neglect was upon the ANC in May this year when it lost its majority in Parliament and was forced into a so-called Government of National Unity (GNU), although it is in fact a grand alliance representing two-thirds of the electorate, gathered in an uneasy partnership of the ruling party, liberals, mavericks and traditionalists. Another quarter is represented by the left-behind racist, nativist and anti-constitutionalist rump gathered in the two main opposition parties, the recently sprung Zulu-based Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK) and the Economic Freedom Fighters, the latter a diminished Gucci revolutionary movement now competing with the real deal guys in MK, those who actually do revolution.

The founding principle of our very fine Constitution, enshrined in Chapter One, is that of non-racialism, a notion that has been knocking around South Africa for decades. It embodies the liberal democratic ideal that a person’s worth and life opportunities should be determined by their character, not their colour, and that state institutions should reflect that self-evident truth. Non-racism is the mantra of the political elites, endlessly espoused by the luminaries of the ruling party and the liberal elements of the Opposition.

It has, however, scant basis in current South African reality. Considerations of racial identity infuse all hiring, investing and policy decisions. It is rare that a contentious point of public policy is not turned into a racial bun-fight; the appointment of a deserving white person to high office is not met with catcalls of “anti-transformation”; the announcement of a national sporting team not assailed for “lack of representivity”; an incautious word or action not maliciously turned into a racial cause célèbre by politicians. Is this a temporary malaise? Unlikely: racial preferment is now so embedded in the national psyche that it is hard to see its early demise. Where once the modest demand by black South Africans was equality of opportunity it is now the unattainable equality of outcomes. It is a worn plaint, universally replicated.

In May, the South African electorate voted overwhelmingly on racial lines. African National Congress support came 98% from Africans, Umkhonto we Sizwe 99.4% and the Economic Freedom Fighters 97.6%. The exception was the liberal Democratic Alliance which, although majority white, had a better spread of other races and thus qualifies as the only major South African party that is “non-racial”. As the DA has always battled to attract more than a fifth of the voters and as only 4.2% of African voters supported it in May, the prospects for a change anytime soon seem to be receding. The sobering lesson of the last three and a half centuries, and in particular the last three decades, is that non-racialism is, and always was, a non-starter.

And yet, and yet, the society and the nation shambles forward, often precariously, sometimes purposely and occasionally wondrously.

Partly this is due to the institutional foundations that help hold it together: an excellent constitution and impeccable Constitutional Court; a still largely competent high court system to which South Africa’s squabbling political elites turn with refreshing readiness to resolve their spats. There is also a vituperative and watchful media and many civil activist groups. These entities survive the rolling crises that periodically sweep the country like wild fires in the dry season.

Again, despite all the lip-service to non-racialism, and the failed attempts by the Left and the commercial advertisers to force an image of beery non-racial bonhomie, South Africans, although diverse, remain unrepentantly different. Unlike the United Kingdom, for example, where the establishment talks of diversity but savagely penalises any mention of difference, South Africans are quite happy to talk about their ethnicity, culture, clan, family name, tribe, likes, dislikes, prejudices and stereotypes, as long as one does not resort to pejorative colonial expressions of race or be condescending. Foreign visitors are often struck by how politely ordinary South Africans treat each other in their daily encounters, seemingly able to look beyond a fraught history, difference and a lived legacy of considerable inequality.

Indeed, South Africans have gone to the extent of recognising 11 official languages, one effectively extinct. They have created a Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Rights Commission, a Council of Traditional Leaders, an Equity Court and a Human Rights Commission. All of this is to protect difference and mediate conflict arising from our differences.

The Government of National Unity forced on the ANC mirrors this existent political, social and racial pluralism. It is not a non-racial alliance but a wary coalition of ethnic parties united in the common objective of enriching themselves and their groups and, along the way, hopefully and eventually, all of South Africa. It holds out the possibility of a fresh beginning after all the romantic hogwash about a Rainbow Nation.

Herein the irony: as a riven South Africa grapples to forge a set of national values that yet recognise historic, social and cultural differences, however imperfectly, the political elites in so many developed world countries, United Kingdom included, have done little in recent decades but deny, traduce or belittle the worth or even existence of such values.

Such views miss the significance of the man who, together with former president Frederik Willem de Klerk, helped steer his country away from imminent disaster. The tragedy now playing out in the Middle East should remind South Africans how fortunate they were to have such visionaries at a unique moment in national history.

Mandela had three things going for him: he was a decent man; his long incarceration had kept him untainted by all the bad things that happened during his liberation movement; and, crucially, his only five-year term in office came while the sinews of the civil and security services of the departed apartheid system could still hold the state together — in a sense they bore him on their hands. His successors had no such luck.

Yet the former president had little interest in, or understanding of, the minutiae of government. He governed by halo reputation, charm and an engaging naiveté. All problems could be dismissed with an incomparable smile and a witty comment. It could not last of course; not in a multi-riven country like South Africa.

When I was editor of the South African Sunday Times during the political transition of the mid-Nineties, I engaged Mandela often, not always frictionlessly. He once chose to use a meeting of national editors to accuse white editors of telling black reporters what to write, which I pointed out was more demeaning to the latter than the former.

The subsequent frostiness was partly alleviated when I invited him to be the patron of a Sunday Times-sponsored expedition to put the first South African woman and the new flag atop Mount Everest. The expedition went haywire when its mercurial leader split the party at Base Camp 4, leaving only him and the two women members of the team to assail the heights. Our circulation rocketed but it fell to me to fly to Cape Town to tell our Patron the bad news.

“You mean the women are still prepared to go on?” Mandela asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Then my patronage stands. Give them my best wishes.”

The policy legacies of his 111-year-old African National Congress (ANC) have, sadly, been neither as decisive nor noble. In a May 1990 address to the Consultative Business Movement, four years before taking office, Mandela sketched the broad strategic political and economic views of the ANC, emphasising the importance of full employment, maximum productivity, social consciousness, partnership between state and business, the growth of small businesses and of land reform. Although predictably heavy on old-style dirigisme, he insisted that nationalisation and redistribution weren’t the only words in the ANC vocabulary. “It is important that we should stop propagating the gloomy picture of South Africa that, as it is said, will inevitably sink into the economic crisis that afflicts many African countries,” he said.

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Britain is turning into South Africa

By Wessie du Toit

How has that worked out for South Africa, after nearly 30 years of ANC rule? The party to which Mandela belonged now faces its Venezuela moment after ignoring for decades the catastrophic impact of its administrative, ideological and race-based preferment policies. The Government’s recent Medium Term Budget Statement (MTBPS) illustrates this in a nutshell. In the first six months of the financial year, the main budget deficit has grown by more than 50% to a chasmic R53 billion (£2.2 billion). On this trajectory, South Africa will have to repay R242.5 billion (£10.2 billion) a year in finance charges.

To blame are runaway spending on benefits (45% of South Africans receive social grants) and public service salaries (on average nearly twice as much as in the private sector), matched by a huge drop in taxes due to industries crippled by power interruptions (forfeiting 5% of GDP) and collapsing port facilities (another 4.9%). Economic growth has stalled at 0.1% and unemployment is at 32%, its highest ever, while a recent World Bank Report claims 10% of GDP is being robbed through crime. About 36% of water in most municipalities is lost through broken pipes and nearly one fifth of the electricity sold by the national energy provider to municipalities is stolen through illegal connections in informal settlements.

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South Africa's infinite humiliation

By Brian Pottinger

Meanwhile, vast amounts of state resources have been ploughed into stimulating micro and small businesses and rural co-operatives in line with Mandela’s vision. This has been overwhelmingly wasted through incompetence, corruption or indifference at both donor and recipient level. The latest, a mega-farm project for the Khutso-Naketsi Community Property Association, has collapsed through state tardiness and corruption by the trustees. Elsewhere, a lodestar job-creation programme is stalled due to a corruption probe, while KwaZulu Natal’s largest development agency, the 60-year-old Ithala, is poised to have its core functions closed by the prudential authorities because it has failed to report for two years. Its target customers are black youth and women.

Compared with middle-income countries, South Africa has a depressingly low number of black-owned micro, small and medium businesses. It is understandable: why bother starting your own business when the state will extort somebody else’s equity in an existing one on your behalf or, better still, grant you huge government subsidies that hardly hit the company accounts before ending up as a deposit on a SUV?

Mandela’s optimism was thus grievously wrong. And here lies the tragedy: inheriting a battered apartheid economy, Mandela and to a lesser extent his successor, Thabo Mbeki, appointed excellent finance ministers who pursued disciplined and productive spending in close co-operation with the business sector. That boosted growth and employment, bought significant benefits to the previously marginalised, and, at one point in the early 2000s, even wiped out the deficit and paid down apartheid-era loans. A still-competent state and parastatal network, capable of massive scaling to meet the new demands, was in place. Deep capital markets and an enviable skills base were available. The Australia (or Singapore) of Africa was ostensibly aborning.

But that promise was never fulfilled. The failure was largely the result of the ANC’s policy of racial preference in employment, investment, scholarships, tendering and trading. Under the guise of being a development project, black economic empowerment, or its buzzword, “transformation”, has been perverted into a multi-tentacled succubus, draining the economic life of the country and supporting a one-way flow of state sanctioned, expropriated wealth into the hands of a monstrously hungry and unproductive new business and public service elite comprising slightly more than 1% of the population. Exactly what Mandela did not want.

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Will South Africa's sullied President survive?

By Brian Pottinger

This so-called empowerment process has different iterations. One was the prototypic past endowment by white capitalists of swathes of equity on selected black leaders — the incumbent President is merely the most luminous of the many beneficiaries. Another is “cadre deployment” which has seen the drafting of large numbers of direly incompetent and corrupt party “cadres” into the public service and the State Operated Entities. At every conceivable level of state administration party, “tenderpreneurs” have inserted themselves as pestilential middlemen. According to a recent report by Ricardo Hausmann of Harvard’s Growth Lab, these operators have raised the cost of state purchasing by 20% without a scintilla of benefit to anybody but themselves. The empowerment system, meanwhile, has cost approximately 3% of GDP. Crime, corruption, cronyism and cluelessness are thus robbing the country of nearly a quarter of its GDP, and this in a country not even at war. Ukraine, besieged and a third occupied, by comparison, lost 30% of GDP last year.

The empowerment system underwrote South Africa’s so-called State Capture phase which flourished under the malignant reign of former president Jacob Zuma and involved crippling levels of embezzlement of state resources. Despite facing countless criminal charges in the High Courts, Zuma is being quietly rehabilitated into ANC structures to retain the Zulu vote. A disemboweled national prosecuting service, meanwhile, has been unable to land a single high-level conviction in five years.

Yet, typically, the ANC remains unbowed by its spectacular failures, preferring to fall back onto its default posture of blaming apartheid, the private sector and whites. Indeed, with a contentious general election looming next year in which it may lose its overall majority, the ANC is doubling down on its race preference policies and on social spending: a national basic income grant now looms and, against Treasury advice, an early implementation of legislation to allow pensioners to draw down some of their pensions. Part of it is electioneering, but much is driven by the view at all levels of ANC public representation that the window for graft may at last be closing.

South Africa now stands at arguably the most dangerous yet logical end phase of ANC-style one-way “empowerment”. Criminal cartels have effectively privatised and democratised the state-sanctioned project of wealth expropriation for their own account. In the construction industry, for example, so-called Business Forums seek to extort 30% of the value of all construction projects by violence. Most of the mainly black-owned taxi and long haulage sectors are cartelised, untaxed and in some cases criminalised. The R90 billion-a-year taxi industry, for example, paid R5 million in taxes last year.

President Ramaphosa, elected five years ago on the promise of clean and effective government, is powerless to address this scourge because so many of his party colleagues are beneficiaries, nor will he admit that its genesis lies in the “empowerment” dogma he still, against all evidence, so assiduously promotes. Like Tancredi Falconeri in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s classic, The Leopard, he wants everything to be changed for nothing to change. Mandela’s vision has been betrayed, and by his own comrades.

Schreiner’s words would strike her countryfolk today with stark resonance. The white middle classes, confined to their urban or coastal bubble communities, have largely given up — those who can leave often do. The black middle class are hardly different: revolutionaries have become businessmen and sometimes not very honest ones. “I did not join the struggle to die poor,” proclaimed one senior ruling African National Congress (ANC) politician endlessly mired in sleaze allegations. The unions, meanwhile, are corrupted by greed and the “democratic movements” — a few courageous exceptions allowed — are knee-deep in self-enrichment.

It is now clear that whatever force drives public policy within the opaque and factional halls of the ruling party — which is certainly not the impressionable President Cyril Ramaphosa, who drifts like kelp in the coastal currents of the Western Cape seas — has come to three dreadful conclusions. Firstly, the ANC will stick to its catastrophic redistributive economic policies rather than pursuing growth. Secondly, knowing that its economic plan will cause chaos, the government will batten the hatches against capital flight and pre-emptively seek to chill free speech. And thirdly, it has accepted that what is left of developed world investment interest will dry up and a flailing South African state will have to find succor elsewhere. Enter the Russians and the Chinese.

Let’s start with the ANC’s disastrous economic policy. The recently passed National Health Insurance Act seeks to impose a complex and unaffordable R256 billion (£11 billion) national health insurance system on a state which has utterly failed in key governance functions for nearly 30 years due to epic corruption and maladministration. This has been most prominent in healthcare, where criminal cartels have operated with impunity for decades in securing tenders and, in one recent case, assassinated a whistleblower. The new measures, meanwhile, threaten to displace the extensive and highly successful private healthcare system on which the middle classes and many formally employed workers depend, black and white.

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Other draft regulations, this time by the Department of Labour, allow the government to set employment targets for every business to reflect the precise demographic profile of the country, both an absurdity and an impossibility given the uneven spread of skills and demography. On top of this, draft regulations by the Department of Water and Sanitation require businesses and farmers applying for water rights permits to prove that between 25% and 75% of their businesses are black-owned: the equivalent of asking multi-generational Devon farming families to cede chunks of the value of their farms to Tory cronies for the future right to draw water from the Tamar.

And this comes on the back of a failed land restitution programme, which has seen a catastrophic decline in productivity and employment in the millions of hectares handed to new crony or communal ownership. Millions of other hectares, 2.8 million in KwaZulu Natal province alone, remain under communal tenure systems dating to Victorian times. The ANC is too afraid of a rural insurgency to touch the power of the traditional leaders who have the right to rule over this land: the whites are an easier target.

All of these measures will certainly be fought tooth-and-nail up to the Constitutional Court, and may well be defeated: the Court, some brave opposition politicians, and a small band of intrepid and independent investigative journalists remain the only deterrents to South Africa becoming a badge-bearing failed African state. But in the interim, the proposals are creating enormous uncertainty.

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This explains why, on the eve of Easter this year, the South African Revenue Services quietly published amendments to its capital export rules. Whereas once individuals could export R10 million (£431,000) a year as offshore investments, now the transfers are classified under the same terms as those dealing with formal emigration: a vastly more complicated and expensive process. The authorities insist the measure is simply to tighten up on cross-border movement of securities after the country was grey-listed by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) for laxity when billions of rands of embezzled state money flowed out of the country in the freebooting days of former president Jacob Zuma.

Yet it forms part of a trend. Regulatory changes in 2021 prevented emigrating pensioners from having their pensions paid abroad for three years after leaving South Africa. This effectively kept them hostage, denying them the opportunity to fund the waiting periods to get foreign residency rights. If the young are fleeing, grab the old folks. The government, meanwhile, is pushing ahead with amendments to the Prevention and Combatting of The Crime of Hate Speech Act, which free-speech advocates argue could be used to suppress genuine dissident opinions. Given that the ANC routinely dismisses as racist all criticism of its actions — no matter how valid — this is not an unjustified concern.

The effect of all this will be to hasten the already terrifying skills exodus from South Africa. Nearly a fifth of white South Africans have emigrated since the political transition in 1994; the white proportion of the population is now almost half what it was then. With them went a significant slice of current and future high-level skills. Emigration rates among the talented and hugely entrepreneurial Indian-descended community is reaching similar proportions, limited only by their sense of family duty. This exodus is comparable to the rates of migration from Ireland in the mid-19th century, Italy in the early 20th-century and Syria during the civil war.

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Collapsed state educational and training institutions cannot feed demand quickly enough with young black replacements. The coy phrase “capacity crisis” runs through all state justifications for its universal institutional failures, yet it is a self-induced crisis caused by the systemic discrimination against whites and latterly Indians — many of whom were not even born during apartheid — in access to state jobs, tenders and bursaries, and in the preferential employment policies forced on the private sector. In the place of the departing whites have come an estimated 3 million migrants and economic refugees from the rest of Africa, sparking xenophobic outbreaks from black South Africans and the recent panicky withdrawal by the government of 834,000 temporary work permits for Zimbabweans, who have traditionally done the menial and artisan work black South Africans prefer not to do.

The impact on the tax base is visible. Only 12.3% of South Africans pay income tax, and this figure is diminishing. Meanwhile 47% of all South Africans draw state grants, rising to 62% of the black population, and this is growing. Unemployment is at an all-time high of 32.9%. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicts a growth rate of 0.1% for this year, far below that of African peers. We don’t need Yeats to grasp that the centre cannot hold.

That reality was abruptly reinforced last week by the IMF’s annual Article IV Report on South Africa, which warned that the country urgently needed to get its financial house in order lest its current “moderate” risk of sovereign distress deteriorates. The warning coincided with historically low rates for the rand and the first signs that the government may not be able to find enough local buyers for the bonds, which foreign holders spooked by the ANC’s inexplicable policies have been dumping since 2019. Retailers speak openly of bread riots. The Arab Spring is invoked.

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The response of President Cyril Ramaphosa has been typical: an emergency meeting last week with South Africa’s captains of industry to hammer out a new contract of mutual support. This time, the ANC ostensibly accepted the long-standing offers of the private sector to provide high-level administrators for state functions: perhaps an admission by the government of its abject inability to govern; perhaps just a ploy with an eye to next year’s elections.

Few here have any confidence it will make a difference: the last man drafted from the corporate world, in this case to head up the national power utility, gave his notice in December last year after a failed poisoning attempt on his life. He was then summarily dismissed when he publicly alleged high-level collusion between senior ANC figures and criminal cartels leeching the entity. Many ask why Big Business has not demanded an end to the government’s reckless economic redistributive policies as a price for cooperation, but then since the Act of Union in 1910, it has always rolled over for its tummy to be rubbed by the politicians. The cash registers must ring.

The situation is now dire. South Africa’s postal services, rated worse than Nigeria’s by the Universal Postal Union, is about to file for bankruptcy. The ports are rated in the bottom 10 out of the 370 facilities listed on the Container Port Performance Index. The national electricity supplier is technically bankrupt after years of plundering, racial preferment in jobs and tenders, and sabotage. Power outages of 12 hours a day are common. This week it was confirmed that impoverished Mozambique, languishing towards the bottom of the UN Human Development Index (HDI), would be asked to supply power to South Africa, once the most successful economy in Africa.

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Every financial metric has weakened under Ramaphosa’s tenure, which is ironic when one considers it was the business community that bankrolled his presidential ambitions in 2017 on the promise he would cleanse the ruling party, create a reformist alliance, and put the country back onto the path of modernity. Pity his backers did not insist on money-back guarantees. The betrayal of the promise of the democratic transition in 1994 is complete, the humiliation absolute.

It is not surprising, then, that the ANC government, bust, broke and bereft of old allies, has turned to new friends who can be relied on not to raise inconvenient questions about governance or human rights or competitiveness: Russia and China. South Africa has refused to condemn Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. Indeed, its navy took part in joint operations with China and Russia in February this year. More intriguingly, in December last year, an embargoed Russian ship, the Lady R, secretly loaded a consignment of munitions from the Simonstown naval shipyard, according to a public accusation made on 12 May by Reuben Brigety, US Ambassador to South Africa. Subsequent reports suggest the cargo may have been bound not for Russia, but for the Russian-Wagner-supported Rapid Support Forces fighting a civil war in Sudan for the reinstatement of their old boss and the ANC’s friend, Omar al Bashir. The deposed president, now imprisoned for corruption, is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged human rights violations in Darfur Province during his tenure. Typically, President Ramaphosa, nicknamed here “Cyril The Silent”, smartly shuffled the issue into a secret Commission of Inquiry whose findings, he assures, will not be made public.

What is not in dispute, however, is that Russian oligarchs close to President Vladimir Putin, some on the US embargo list, are now the main financial backers of the perennially bankrupt ANC. Nor is it contested that a mysterious cache of dollar notes stolen from a sofa inside Ramaphosa’s private game lodge two years ago originated from a Sudanese businessman, Hazim Mustafa, identified by Sudanese media in 2017 as once being close to, yes, Omar al Bashir.

This diplomatic shift has not been a considered strategic response. Like all ANC initiatives, it is a survivalist cringe in the face of a self-induced crisis: panicked, clumsy, shortsighted, self-serving, and harmful. Inevitably, it ends in farce or tragedy as has happened with South Africa’s turn to host Brazil, Russia, China, and India at the BRICS summit in August. The event, which Ramaphosa wanted to make a jamboree of for his new best friends, has turned into a Ruth Rendell-type nightmare in which the host might technically be expected to arrest a main guest, Putin, on a warrant issued by the ICC of which South Africa is a member (but not Russia or China).

South Africa faced the same dilemma in June 2015, when the ubiquitous al Bashir attended an African Union meeting in Durban as Sudanese President while confronted by an ICC arrest warrant. A South African court ordered that he be detained pending clarification as to whether he be handed over to the ICC, but the South African government let him walk away with no more than a tut-tut from the liberal press and opposition.

Now, however, the stakes are far higher, with a vastly displeased United States watching closely. In a typical piece of diversionary fandango, President Ramaphosa has rustled up four other African Heads of State for a lightening “peace mission” to Moscow and Kyiv next week. The summit may move to China or go virtual or be held in South Africa with an immune Putin in attendance, in which case the US will certainly exclude South Africa from the benefits of the Africa Growth Opportunity Act (AGOA), which gives South African exporters, primarily agricultural, a free ride into US markets. Indeed, a bipartisan group of Congressmen have asked Washington to boot South Arica now. One of the country’s top banks, meanwhile, has warned that the government is imperilling up to R32 billion in foreign trade because of its dalliance with Russia. Whatever the outcome, it will either lead to national humiliation or to further economic devastation.

Is there a way out of this nightmare of serially dashed hopes? General elections are to be held next year. The ANC’s share of registered voters has dropped from its high of 58% in 1999 to 37% in 2019. If no more than one in five ANC voters chooses to go to the shebeen rather than the polls next year, party support will drop 31%. Even in coalition with its natural ally, the nativist Economic Freedom Front (EFF), an organisation with, if possible, a more elevated sense of entitlement than even the ANC, it leaves a pool of between 55% and 59% of registered voters to build a possible winning reformist and modernist coalition from four of the main liberal and conservative opposition parties. That is if they too do not engage in what Schreiner diagnosed as a “lifeless striving for gain for themselves” and if, crucially, a defeated ANC complies with the last great rule of democracy: go when you are licked. The record is not encouraging.

“There are two kinds of egoists in the world,” wrote Rowan Williams after meeting Tutu. “There are egoists who are so in love with themselves that they have no room of anyone else and there are those egoists that are so in love with themselves that they make it possible for everybody else to be in love with themselves.” Tutu was the second sort of egoist. Desmond Tutu loved being Desmond Tutu, but in such a way that he encouraged other people to believe that they could also be in love with who they are and take joy in it.

This cuts across what many in his generation thought about being a priest. When I was taught to celebrate the Eucharist, for instance, I was encouraged not to show any personality in my recitation of the holy words of consecration. The important thing as a priest is to get out of the way, to be a conduit between other people and God. Don’t put yourself, your personality, between the congregation and the divine. Don’t modulate your voice, don’t try to inject meaning into your words. Your job is to disappear. Say the words like you are reading from the telephone directory. The congregation don’t come to church for you.

Tutu did it very differently. Some in the old school thought what you got with Desmond Tutu was the Desmond Tutu Show, and they slightly disapproved. But this wonderful little man from South Africa, with his impish sense of fun and Old Testament prophet morality, had a totally different theology from that of the Old School. And it was from this theology that all his activism and politics cascaded — “the glory of God is a human being fully alive”, as the second-century church father Irenaeus put it. Tutu loved that line and it often cropped up in his sermons. It captured his theology in a nutshell.

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In other words, Desmond Tutu was very much a Christmas Christian. God comes into the world as a human being so that human beings might regard themselves as divine, a part of the divine life. Tutu once remarked that as all human beings contain the image and likeness of God, we ought to genuflect before everyone we meet.

Tutu often told the story of his parish priest in Johannesburg, the legendary Fr Trevor Huddleston, once doffing his hat to his mother — a white man simply acknowledging the humanity of a black woman being a revolutionary act in the context of South Africa in the Forties. It was a genuflection, of sorts. And this is where Tutu’s theology and politics grows from: all human beings reflect God’s glory, all of them. His hatred of apartheid was at root theological, rather than political — though this is a false binary, of course. His point was that apartheid was a heresy. It was a failure to see God in others; in those who are of a different colour, in those who are lesbian and gay, and most radically of all, in the oppressor too.

But this theology of the person was in no sense individualistic. Perhaps the most important contribution that African Christianity has made to Christianity has been through the development of the idea of Ubuntu — the idea that “I am because you are”. We are not individual cells of separate Godliness, but through God’s presence within us all, we are all brothers and sisters. And so in order to be fully what God intended, we have to be reconciled with those from whom we have become estranged. Forgiveness was not some sentimental touchy-feely emotional weakness, but a tough-minded determination to recognise our own humanity as inescapably bound up with others. Confessing past wrongs with the hope of some sort of reconciliation was a way of putting the pieces of the self back together.

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Tutu was hated for this insight as much as he was loved. When he chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he was putting into practice a version of this theology: that only through forgiveness could a community find the gift of a common future. Forgiveness meant breaking the cycle of tit-for-tat revenge. It wasn’t about having warm and fuzzy feelings about those that had participated in the evil that was apartheid. It was the belief that a future was possible, but only through a process of confession and forgiveness in which the image of God is restored in others. This was a basic priestly insight turned into a political process.

There were times when he got it wrong, of course. His extension of the apartheid tag to the situation in Israel/Palestine was a mistake. Perhaps inevitably, he saw the world too much through the lens of his own history, and was sometimes blind to its differences. That’s why many Jews think of Tutu as a much more morally ambivalent figure.

He was also hated by the hard Left as much as by the Right. Tutu had absolutely no time for Marxism. At heart, he was a prayerful cassock-wearing Anglo-Catholic Anglican priest of a very familiar sort. He wasn’t a political radical, but a faithful servant of the church, with a huge personality, preaching what he saw with enormous courage in wicked times. And it was because he was a priest that the apartheid regime never dared to touch him. He called it as he saw it, including in his vociferous condemnations of the ANC as they descended into corruption and petty infighting. Tutu could be the friend of anyone, yet he was no one’s patsy.

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Tutu once said that if he ever walked on water, the South African press would have chosen the headline “Tutu cannot swim”. We forget now how much he was hated and traduced by the whole apparatus of racist apartheid. How his life was threatened. He is now seen as a hero of human rights, which isn’t quite accurate. Yes, he used the secular language of human rights, but it was the Imago Dei — the imprint of God in us all — that was his basic guiding insight.

Will we see his like again in the Church? These days our bishops are largely chosen for their management skills and abilities to run a spreadsheet. Tutu showed us God by being so wonderfully himself, a human being, flawed no doubt, but fully and magnificently alive. His theology and his personality were perfectly aligned. That’s why we loved him. May he rest in peace and rise in glory.

The former event brought the country’s warring white tribes together in a wary equilibrium of mutual benefit which lasted through more than seven decades of economic growth and modernisation. The latter cobbled together all the nation’s tribes — black, white, Asian and mixed-race — into a fragile comity that, despite a weakening State, has yet somehow survived its first quarter century; frayed, hissy and bowed, to be sure, but somehow miraculously still alive.

The Act of Union was forged less than a decade after a bitter war, described either as a noble, imperial mission, or one of Africa’s great freedom struggles, depending on which side of the kopje one sat. The critical fault-lines at the National Convention called to give form to a united South Africa were between a Cape liberal vision of South Africanism, which included a very limited form of “Native” representation in Parliament, and a bleaker, exclusionary view by the Boer Transvaal and Orange Free State delegates. English-speaking Natal, from which many of the imperial combatants had come, was also exclusionary: it wanted to exclude itself from Union altogether.

The Boer approach won and thus was early laid the contours of the apartheid state which, in various guises, survived two World Wars, The Great Depression, two fringe Afrikaner rebellions and a bruising white national strike in 1922 which was eventually suppressed, literally, by artillery fire. It also survived decolonisation, international sanctions, two decades of simmering internal rebellions, two States of Emergency and a 15-year-long defensive wars along the borders of Angola and Mozambique which consumed huge amounts of national resource and the time, although not many of the lives, of my generation of young white males.

How on earth did it hold together?

A healthy devolution of power to provincial level helped mollify Cape Liberals and “Natal Stand” reactionaries, as did a mutual respect for language, culture and religion. International sanctions also solidified a sense of unity: it is amazing what indiscriminate vilification can do to engender a sense of common purpose amongst otherwise diverse people.

But the real glue, despite all challenges, was the trajectory of the country towards modernisation, economic growth, rising employment in all sectors, burgeoning physical infrastructure and growing national prosperity, although grievously unequally distributed. Money, the balm to nearly all wounds, softened the edge of communal antagonism between English-speaking and Afrikaans-speaking whites; there was a quantum improvement in living standards across the board, initially for whites and then increasingly for other marginalised groups.

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International sanctions in the Eighties spurred a surge in internal industrial manufacturing and high tech development from which Afrikaners were disproportionately the winners. Sanctions thus won not by making white South Africans poorer, as liberals predicted, but by making Afrikaners richer and more amenable to the tides of history.  This was not the generation of 1948 that brought the Afrikaner’s National Party and Grand Apartheid to power. This was an educated, richer, more cosmopolitan generation which accepted the absurdity of a small racial minority trying to dominate a much larger, restless and offended majority. The Afrikaners started dealing for an inclusive future South Africanism, a broadened and modernised Cape vision if you will, that would bring stability and profit.

In the early Nineties arose the perfect confluence of event, circumstance and personality.  The border wars ended with the advent of Glastnost and the end of superpower meddling in the region: everybody went home. The internal rebellions were snuffed out by two brutal States of Emergency during which the State had assumed virtually limitless powers of arrest, detention and censorship. Stellar political leadership arose in the opposing camps. The two most important western leaders, President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, threw their weight behind the project.

It succeeded in a way it could never have done now. Catapult this moment forward to today and the African National Congress would be incited to up the ante by Western governments and a feral social media: armed resistance groups would be equipped and trained to “equalise” forces, human rights groups would have piled into the fray, white politicians would have been threatened with the Court of International Justice and progressives would have sought to virtue-signal the people of southern Africa into oblivion. Whites, like the Israelis, would have gone back to the trenches.

It never happened. Three years of intense negotiations at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa brought a genuinely and proudly homegrown solution: no local leaders being forced with gritted teeth to shake hands before some benign United States President here.

But this new Constitution, celebrating its 25th anniversary last Friday, differed from its original version in significant ways. And therein lay its strengths and its weaknesses. Its legacy, a sorely tried one, now lies intimately connected to the central question of whether South Africa will reemerge as a modern state.

The first change was a major concentration of power at the central level: the powers of the nine newly created provincial units — ironically created more on a geo-tribal basis than the old four provinces had ever been — are vestigial. When centralised systems do not work, through State weakness or lack of central political coherence and mission, as in contemporary South Africa, it creates damaging centrifugal forces throughout the polity.

A recent survey of Western Cape residents showed half wished to cede from South Africa. In the Zulu homeland of KwaZulu Natal, a low-level insurgency has been underway for two years, culminating in the bloody July Troubles for which the instigators have not yet been caught. The only thing stopping a renewed 1910-type Natal Stand is the fact that the rebels are a discredited faction of the ruling party with whom nobody wants to associate.

So bad is the collapse of the centre, that more than 60% of South African voters in a recent poll said they want a committee to run the country, if only they would deliver jobs, security and services.

The new constitution also eschewed the attempts by the then ruling whites-only National Party to entrench “group rights”, by which they meant race vetoes. Faith was instead placed in a durable constitution embedding individual rights and an impeccable Constitutional Court to defend those rights.

The Constitution and the Court has worked just fine for 25 years: the ruling party, on the other hand, has not. Massive public sector incompetence and corruption has crippled state and para-state entities; eroded confidence across the board in institutions (particularly criminal justice ones); forced a skills exodus and a foreign capital investment hiatus and driven unemployment: another benchmark in joblessness was reached last week when it officially topped 34.4 % and a heart-stopping 66.5% for those between 15 and 24 years old.

The minorities, meanwhile, are being systematically discriminated against by statute in terms of job opportunities, study grants, internships and other opportunities, a process in which craven corporates seek to outbid each other. Many of the victims were born long after apartheid. Many of the beneficiaries, meanwhile, are children of wealthy black parents; they also never knew apartheid nor indeed poverty.

Under those circumstances, it is not surprising that individuals are falling back on the oldest safe zone redoubts: family, community, tribe. Last month’s local government elections saw a significant drop in the support of the ruling ANC and surges of support for the extremist black socialist and conservative Afrikaans-speaking white and coloured parties. Independent candidates representing ethnic neighbourhoods did well.

So where should hope be sought, on this 25th anniversary of the new democracy’s founding document?

Two anecdotes and a comment.

One: in the run-up to the first democratic election, the African National Congress and members of the Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party engaged in a midday shoot-out in the centre of Johannesburg.

I found shelter behind an armoured personnel carrier with a young rifleman from a Cape regiment.

“So what do you think?,” I asked the soldier.

“Sucks”, he said, “and I haven‘t even had my fucking breakfast.”

So, it is a tough and resilient nation, bomb-proof, that has survived a thousand predictions of Armageddon.

Two: a few months ago I was invited to a Founder’s Day celebration at my once all-white, all-boy state school. The Head Prefect was white, her deputy Indian and the rugby captain black. And we won the memorial match. If it took 80 years for the white tribes to come up with the current constitution, perhaps we need to be patient a bit longer for the younger generations to have a shot.

And lastly. The toxic ruling party that has done such damage for so long is in free fall, its internal organisation is in a shambles; so toxic is it that not one of the major parties would enter coalitions to save its control of the country’s major metro’s.

Only in Ethekwini, largest metro in KwaZulu Natal, with its former Mayor and 16 councillors on bail for alleged fraud, did the ruling party hold on by its fingertips by allying with a tiny party sympathetic to the faction in the ANC’s own ranks that instigated the July Troubles. But that is the Natal Stand.

Last week, 26 ANC Parliamentarians broke ranks and voted against a constitutional amendment that would have allowed seizure of land without compensation. Small green shoots, perhaps, but potentially heralding the beginning of a seismic re-alignment in South African politics that could see a split in the ruling party and the emergence of a coalition of modernist parties committed to turning back, after so many wasted years, the country’s race to irrelevance.