South Africa Today

The country has changed. The end of official Apartheid is not mourned by South Africans. Except for an enclave of Afrikaners who do recall it fondly, and would welcome its return. Canada was in the forefront of condemning the former South African Apartheid government and used all diplomatic means at its disposal, including shame and blame and the pressure of trade sanctions, as well as lobbying its democratic neighbours to join in sanctioning the Apartheid regime.

The reward came when the transition to a democratic South Africa became a reality, and when Nelson Mandela, freed from his long incarceration in Robben Island prison made him finally available as the moral authority of his country to take his African National Congress party to victory and himself as the first black president of the new South Africa. He was given celebratory honourary citizenship in many countries, including Canada.

One term in office sufficed for him to prepare to surrender it to a successor. He and Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu became the face and the voice of conscience of the new South Africa; no recriminations, no violence, no arrests and no government grab of land documented in the legal possession of white South Africans. Forgiveness and togetherness was the order of the day, along with promises to pull blacks out of their endemic poverty.

Now, all those years later, Nelson Mandela's legacy remains an honoured one; education and health services are available to everyone. Free, fair elections take place, and multi-racial opposition parties see inclusion in all aspects of political and private and commercial life. There is no discernible interference in the judiciary, and there is a free press, along with private radio stations in competition with the official broadcast service.

But inadequate housing remains a problem, and so does widespread, dire poverty. Unemployment is distressingly high. The country has been flooded with refugees from neighbouring countries fleeing instability, oppression, and violence. Yet South Africa seems incapable of controlling its own overwhelming violent crime rates. And there is corruption everywhere. And resentment because of high unemployment, at the presence of refugees willing to undercut wages for work.

Young South Africans are less wedded to the concept of achieving an academic record than they should be, releasing to the public hordes of young people who are uneducated and unskilled and who thus cannot be a credit to a growing industrial and commercial base, despite the country's potential. Young people leave the education system without achieving diplomas, only to enter a weak labour market minus qualifications for employment.

The general health condition of South Africans is dismal. HIV/AIDS runs rampant through the population. Violent rape is common, and there remains a generalized aura of sexual promiscuity among the young. Ignorance of the cause of HIV/AIDS is widespread; under former President Thabo Mbeki the prevalence of men believing AIDS could be overcome by sleeping with a virgin saw its apotheosis in his successor, Jacob Zuma, raping a young HIV/AIDS-positive woman who trusted him as an 'uncle'.

Nepotism and cronyism in government administration is widespread, as are illicit procurement procedures. Parliamentarians as guilty of corrupt fiddling of accounts as public civil servants. Police have been involved with drug traffickers, and embezzlement is widespread in South African society. The highly moral South African administration saw nothing they should criticize in the criminal administration of Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe.

While neither Bishop Desmond Tutu nor Nelson Mandela's voices were raised in condemnation of Robert Mugabe for despoiling his once-wealthy and productive country -- spreading poverty and unemployment, raising inflation to sky-high levels, promoting the illegal seizure of white-owned farmland, and destroying the agricultural base of a country once famous for exporting excess food, now dependent on imports -- both have raised their voices in condemnation of "Apartheid" Israel.

South Africa is in dire need of being rescued from its congenital and seemingly inescapable dysfunction.