Zuma and co destroy the rainbow nation ideal

It is becoming increasingly difficult to use the words ‘rainbow nation’ and not be looked at as a Nelson Mandela apologist.

Mandela and his comrades sold us an ideal: a South Africa in which black and white live side by side, peacefully.

The narrative emerging now is one which has the black majority looking at the rainbow nation ideal and asking themselves: why am I still economically sidelined when Mandela and his comrades promised a prosperous future for all citizens?

Why does the grass that seemed greener on the other side of the economic divide now seem like a mirage I will never get to?

The current political climate continues to remove focus from the government’s inability to manage the citizens’ expectations.

We have slowly but surely slid back to the era where service delivery protests are becoming the order of the day.

Just last week, the coloured communities in Gauteng rose up against “not being considered black enough post-democracy, just as we were not white enough before 1994”.

They, too, want to have service delivery ramped up after years of neglect.

Sadly, they will never get to a point where they appreciate that a poor citizen in Ivory Park who has been waiting for an RDP house for more than 20 years is in exactly the same boat.

The poisoned well that is our political landscape also has those who were economically well off in the past looking over their shoulders at the mention of economic justice or radical economic transformation.

A radio talk show last week on the stalled project that is our rainbow nation produced a white male who went as far as saying whites feel persecuted in the current economic climate and that there is a witch-hunt set on vilifying all that is white in the name of economic redress for the previously disadvantaged.

The truth lies somewhere in between the angry voices of the political dissents that seem to be emerging every single day. These voices emerge on every issue that requires us to address past injustices. And it is no coincidence.

These are cracks the rainbow nation project put Band-Aids on in the interests of short-term peace. But Mandela and his fellow leaders never closed the door on us addressing economic injustices of the past.

If anything, the current situation of a government led by a person as compromised as Jacob Zuma is the biggest impediment to reviving the stalled Project SA initiative.

Funds that are being bled every single day through state-owned enterprises are those that could be used to address service delivery in the poorest areas. Yet we continue to watch helplessly week after week when evidence emerges of the worst kind of looting, perpetrated by those closest to the president.

The trillion-rand nuclear project the current administration is so determined to push through at all costs will not only deplete much-needed funds to address people’s living needs in the poorest areas, it will also corrode the little that is left of the goodwill that Mandela’s rainbow ration ideal generated, and off which we have lived for almost two decades.

South Africa deserves better.

Sydney Majoko.