Gwynne Dyer
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born,” wrote Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci in 1929. “Now is the time of monsters.”
Gramsci’s remark is being liberally quoted by South African journalists in the run-up to the election on 29 May, for the old world in which the African National Congress completely dominated the country’s politics is definitely coming to an end. For the first time since the end of apartheid, the ANC’s share of the vote will fall below 50 percent.
Unfortunately, the decline of the party that ended white minority rule in South Africa has not led to the emergence of big new parties with big new ideas. It’s just the same old parties with the same old ideas.
Thirty years on from the end of apartheid, the country’s official unemployment figure is 32 percent. More than three-fifths of South Africans live in poverty. The World Bank says that it is Africa’s most developed country, but also its most unequal — and the inequality is still colour-coded.
Even when the ANC tries to do something right, it gets it wrong. One-quarter of the country’s farmland is now owned by black South Africans, for example, up from 10 percent at the end........