South Africa’s centre still holds

Take a bow South Africa.

On 16 June 1999, Thabo Mbeki gave his inaugural speech as president as he stepped in to replace the father of the nation, Nelson Mandela. Few will remember that doomsday conspiracy theorists had predicted the 1999 election would be the end of SA as the world knew it.

They predicted that as soon as Mandela stepped out of office the inevitable war of the races would happen and the glue that held the country together would melt away and chaos would ensue. Which is what had prompted Mbeki to quote Irish poet WB Yeats when he accepted the election result: “The centre held, things did not fall apart.”

The centre did indeed hold after Mandela left. Yes, things did not go as the majority would have wished they would, but South Africa is still standing 25 years after Nelson Mandela left the Union Buildings.

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When South Africa went to the polls in May, some of the fears that people had in ’94 and ’99 were stoked back into existence. Certain sections of the population threatened the election would not be held unless their terms were met, however messed up those terms were.

Who will forget the uMkhonto we Sizwe’s Visvin Reddy threatening all sorts of chaos if the party or former president Jacob Zuma were to be removed from the ballot paper because of the challenges they were facing shortly before the election?

People might also remember that during the interregnum between when voting took place and when the election results were announced, Zuma went on national television pleading with the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) to “not provoke us”.

Those who remembered July 2021 know that was no idle threat. But the centre did hold. The election results were announced and accepted. And South Africa still stands.

But perhaps bigger than South Africa’s election miracle was that with which South Africa’s two biggest political parties put together what is still today referred to as the government of national unity (GNU).

While accepted in some quarters as indeed a GNU similar to the one Nelson Mandela’s ANC put together after their victory in ’94, this one is more a coalition between the ANC and the DA but with an open door allowing all parties that chose to be a part of government to walk in.

Notable absentees who refuse to call the arrangement a GNU are the country’s third and fourth largest parties respectively, the MK party and Julius Malema’s EFF.

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One of the most notable things that followed Mbeki succeeding Mandela was that during his second term as president the country’s economic and population growth overtook the state’s ability to provide sustainable electricity for all, leading to blackouts that were euphemistically called load shedding.

These became a feature of South Africa such that ordinary life was now planned around when electricity was available or not, daily.

For the first time since the first blackouts during Mbeki’s era, South African has had uninterrupted electricity for 280 consecutive days. Maybe more than the election and the resultant GNU this is South Africa’s real 2024 miracle.

In that 1999 address as he took over from Mandela, Mbeki exhorted Comrades Marathon runners taking part in iconic the ultramarathon that very day to “not as fatigue sets in, convince themselves that the road ahead is still too long, inclines too steep…”

South Africans must take a bow for 2024 and hope for a better 2025.

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