SHORT TAKES
By the time of Andre de Ruyter's now famous interview with Annika Larsen on eNCA (22 February 2023) earlier this year he had long been front page news. The South African public, including myself, had been primed to believe the worst.
The earliest signs of rot within the ANC had already started to appear during Mandela's reign, became worse with Mbeki's presidency, further compounded by his Africanist racial rhetoric, the antics around AIDS, the Virodene scandal and the facilitation of Zimbabwe's ruin by Mugabe's brutal and corrupt dictatorship.
The succeeding decade, with the rise of Zupta-style state capture and the sorry sequence of South Africa's moral, infrastructural, social and economic decline has now been so thoroughly aired I cannot bring myself to recapitulate the standard narrative. Those living in South Africa's enclaves of quasi-First World functionality could remain in denial until Eskom struck home.
Only the truly wealthy or politically connected could escape the energy crisis. Tales of sabotage, corruption, criminality, murder, and political complicity at the highest level swept the country. The facts seemed overwhelming. The Daily Maverick published a timeline of 30+ scandals which needed weekly updates to remain relevant.
Many believed that this was only the tip of the iceberg. It was astounding that the South African ship of state, while listing badly, was still just above water. This elicited much comment about South Africa's mysterious ' resilience', but little attempt to understand or document it. A topic for another occasion.