You don’t even have to look for them. You will find the results of the near-destruction of our country, carried out with a vengeance over the past 10 years, in many unexpected places. They hit you in the face just about everywhere. The rot has become systemic.
On Saturday I was mindlessly mooching around social media, as we all do these days, when I read about the release of the high-level review panel report on the State Security Agency (SSA). It revealed (though some of us have known and written about this for ages) that the SSA was repurposed to serve former president Jacob Zuma’s interests.
Bags of cash were passed illegally to ministers who pretended that they were James Bond; journalists and NGOs were spied on; and even President Cyril Ramaphosa’s campaign to become ANC president at the time was infiltrated and destabilised.
The SSA is just one more state institution that was nearly destroyed over the past decade. Add to it what Zuma did to the SA Revenue Service, the Hawks, the National Prosecuting Authority and the SA Police Service. Then ask yourself this: why is crime so high in this country?
Also ask yourself this: why were Zuma and his cronies so hellbent on taking over the operations of the Reserve Bank (disguising their move as nationalisation of the Bank) and tightening their grip on the National Treasury?
The truth is that they had done enough stealing. They needed to take the proceeds of crime out of the country. Their one last obstacle was the Treasury and the Reserve Bank. Go back to the actions of former minister of mineral resources, Mosebenzi Zwane, and you will realise just how close they were to succeeding in stealing these institutions.
Many of Zuma’s cronies may be on the verge of going to jail now, but their actions will continue to hurt this country and the attempts to turn it around for a long time.
Take this Sunday past. The New York Times published a factual, moving, yet hugely damaging article on the SA land issue.
For South Africans the facts are mostly known: the winelands and the frenzied pre-1994 signing of long-term leases to lock in white dominance of land; land hunger and the social issues in the township of Kayamandi and the blind, casual racism of many of the white landowners.
One of the key sentences in the Times piece is this: "Newcomers arrive every day to Kayamandi, mostly from the impoverished Eastern Cape province. The steady migration has made black South Africans the biggest racial group in Stellenbosch, outnumbering whites and people of mixed race, according to a 2016 population survey."
Zuma’s cronies may be on the verge of going to jail but their actions will hurt this country for a long time
Now, we know that apartheid underfunded and systematically impoverished large chunks of the Eastern Cape and many other rural parts of SA designated as "homelands". Yet under former presidents Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki reconstruction and development were slowly beginning to take place. The Human Development Index and others for the period 1994 to 1998 explicitly illustrate this. Tomorrow looked better than yesterday.
In the Zuma years, thanks to his devastation of the state, rural unemployment rose as the economy ground to a halt. What do the people of the Eastern Cape do under these circumstances? They move to a place like Kayamandi, hoping for jobs in prosperous Stellenbosch. Don’t be fooled, the people driving through the night and ending up in that informal settlement are not hoping to become wine farmers. They want jobs.
This is the real tragedy of the past 10 years. The economy was devastated. The poor won’t recover soon. The poor, who were left out of the land reform programme that Zuma systematically underfunded over the "wasted years" of his presidency, will not "weather the storm". They are desperate. They will invade land so they can live. They have no alternative.
The shadow of apartheid is very long. The 10 years of kleptocratic Zuma rule have not helped us tackle its legacy.
Right now, it is not totally clear whether Zuma has not permanently derailed our road to reconstruction and development.
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