The chill pill SA needs is now too big to swallow

After the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990, as South Africa edged towards a negotiated transfer of power, a number of people would ask me (as someone who worked for a decade as a correspondent in Africa) if we would “go the same way as Zimbabwe”.

By that, they meant would South Africa be taken over by Marxist-Leninists in control of a well-armed revolutionary army?

A corollary to that was: shall we (that is, white people) get out now, while we still can?

My answer then was, effectively, for everyone to take a large chill pill.

In what was then Rhodesia in the dying days (in all sense of the word) of 1979, as the British strong-armed all warring groups into a political settlement at Lancaster House, Robert Mugabe’s Zanla guerrilla forces and those of Joshua Nkomo’s Zipra were, in reality, on the cusp of victory.

Rhodesia’s small, but tough, soldiers fought well but were outnumbered and outgunned.

It was only a matter of time before the revolutionaries achieved power through the barrel of the gun.

Also, Mugabe and Nkomo realised they needed to compromise because if it became an all-out fight to the death, they would inherit a smouldering ruin of a country.

The difference in South Africa in the 1990s was the then SA Defence Force.

Undefeated anywhere, they were scarcely troubled by the ANC’s armed wing, the most ineffectual liberation army in the history of Africa.

Another reality in South Africa was wealth: there was plenty of money here, plenty of natural resources still to be exploited and plenty of business to be done, especially by the international business community.

They would not have let the country slide into anarchy.

In the end, the negotiations at Codesa led to the now-forgotten referendum in 1992, where an overwhelming majority of white people voted to voluntarily hand over power to the black majority.

The charisma and leadership of Mandela was good and bad for the country because although he helped unite people, his boundless optimism generated the myth of what Desmond Tutu called “The Rainbow Nation of the People of God”… but postponed dealing with the real issues of poverty and land restitution.

Ask me the same question about Zimbabwe today and, in all honesty, my response would be: I am not so sure.

We are heading down the same slippery financial and economic slope Mugabe rode in the late 1990s, and which resulted in him asking for International Monetary Fund and World Bank loans.

These were granted, at the cost of subsidies for basic foodstuffs – something which ignited the spiralling cost of living, led to protests among war veterans … and Mugabe’s cynical decision to deflect attention by “returning the land to the people”.

Land is already being held out here as a miracle cure.

We all know that it won’t be.

Corruption and theft on an industrial scale by the ANC and its accomplices indicates we are in an economic tailspin from which it will be nearly impossible to recover. And that’s not even talking about growing racism in all quarters, or the tsunami of illegal migrants threatening to overwhelm social infrastructure.

There’s no chill pill big enough for that…

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