JOHANNESBURG - In a recent article in The Observer Rian Malan noted that at "any given moment, all possible futures seem entirely plausible" in South Africa. Indeed, since 1994 this country has never felt as close to safety, or disaster, as it does today. This is perhaps because - like a hiker who has to cross a needle-like ridge to get to a plateau - the path that leads us to safety takes us close to the precipice.
The ANC is no longer the morally or politically dominant organisation that it was five years ago. Its popular support may be much the same as it was back then, but it is internally divided and uncertain of itself. This has opened up space for opposition, and civil society more generally, to be far more assertive.
The transformation processes set in motion during the Mandela-era have produced a corrupt and dysfunctional state, unable to deliver services efficiently (if at all.) This is not a state capable of delivering a "better life for all" or "transforming" the lives of the poor. As President Jacob Zuma noted in a recent speech:
"The experience of government for most people is a frustrating one. They spend more time in government offices waiting for services that are not even sure they will receive. They meet employees across the counters who are sometimes disrespectful and unwilling to serve them. [The poor] spend hours in lines waiting for services, only to be told to come back the following day or the following week. Other than frontline departments, the public is also frustrated by the slow turning wheels generally. It takes too long for undertakings to be honoured and for simple services to be provided. Potholes stay unfilled for months if not years, schools remain without windows, hospitals without medicines."
Corruption eats away at the power of the ANC from two ends. On the one side, it undermines the moral authority of the ANC its confidence in its own virtue. The liberation movement can longer seriously claim, as it did in the mid 1990s, that only it is capable of discerning and advancing the true interests of the black majority.
On the other, it frays the nationalist bond between leaders and led which - as Eli Kedourie observed - is based on the belief that the aims and interests of the ‘liberation movement' are the very same as those for which ‘the people' work and struggle. Sooner or later that bond will snap, as it did in Zimbabwe in 2000, and the liberation movement will be faced with losing power at the ballot box.