Can Ramaphosa push the ‘reset’ button on inequality?

It is deeply ironic that, on Monday, as this country celebrates Freedom Day, South Africans will have their basic freedoms curtailed in one way or another.

For the privileged few, that might be the loss of freedom to walk their dogs, or go running and cycling. For many more, it will be the freedom from financial worry they will have lost, as they sit at home during the coronavirus lockdown on short-time or reduced salaries or even compulsory leave.

For others, though – those who have lost their means of earning a meagre income, or their families who rely on that money – they have lost the freedom to eat, as starvation rears its ugly head.

And therein lies the truth of South Africa as we mark (celebrate is the wrong word because few will be in celebratory mood on Monday) the 26th anniversary of the first democratic election in the history of this country.

We are, as President Cyril Ramaphosa noted when he announced the lockdown extension to 1 May, a country which is still deeply unequal and where the gulf between the haves and the have-nots appears impossible to bridge.

Ramaphosa was correct in observing that the lockdown has brought these disparities into sharp relief. The cessation of many forms of business activity showed just how thin the survival line is for most of our people.

Just over a full generation’s time has elapsed since this country voted for democracy on 27 April, 1994, and our country is more than unequal, as Ramaphosa said; it is deeply fractured.

Those fault lines in society – which closed up markedly in the magical Madiba years – have widened in the last decade, as former president Jacob Zuma and his coterie have unashamedly played the race card to distract not only from their own malfeasance, but also from the ANC’s obvious failure to deliver the better life it promised to its voters.

The schisms along race lines are apparent to see – but less obvious, up to now that is, has been the divisions opening up in our society along class lines. The haves these days are not only white. The have-nots are not only black.

The ANC’s policies of Black Economic Empowerment and “cadre deployment” have contributed in a major way to what some worry is a brewing class war.

The benefits from the ending of apartheid’s discrimination did not trickle their way down to the poor in the townships, even as many made obscene amounts of money because of their political connections.

Existing businesses also lived high off the hog, working happily with an ANC which talked socialist but walked capitalist.

The damage of the Zuma years has left the country woefully unprepared financially for the virus catastrophe, but the expected dramatic economic fall-out also presents the ANC’s cunning politicians with an opportunity to indulge in the sort of social engineering and transformation which they have failed to bring about in the past 26 years.

However, now might just be the time to press the “reset” button on South Africa and implement real measures to reduce inequality.

But will Ramaphosa be the man to do it? Will he seize the opportunity to extend Nelson Mandela’s legacy and allow the country to achieve the potential for greatness it showed in 1994?

Time will tell … and that is not something we have in abundance.

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