Five years after his momentous election as South African president, Nelson Mandela stepped down after one term in office in 1999. Thabo Mbeki, his deputy, took over the mantle of the post-apartheid transition. Mbeki would lead the country for the next nine years, a period of relatively high economic growth which enabled South Africans to begin to taste the fruits of freedom.

To mark 30 years since South Africa’s post-apartheid transition began, The Conversation Weekly podcast is running a special three-part podcast series, What happened to Nelson Mandela’s South Africa?

In this second episode of the series, we talk to two experts about the economic policies introduced to transform the country under Mbeki, and the turmoil of the presidency of Jacob Zuma that followed.

When Mandela took over as president of South Africa in 1994, the country’s economy was emerging from a long recession.

“The immediate period after the democratic transition in 1994 the African National Congress (ANC) ran a programme of austerity, that aimed to reduce spending and, at the same time, reorganise the state,” explains Michael Sachs, an economics professor at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.........

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