South Africa: Country in Crisis

Since the end of apartheid in 1994, South Africa has achieved much: over 3.5 million homes have been built for those with low-incomes, millions have benefitted from the provision of electricity, and a sophisticated social grant system benefitting 15 million people has reduced the number of people facing absolute poverty.  However, as South Africa enters 2016, there is widespread concern not only that the country is in crisis, but also that the national leadership is simply detached from reality.  There have been warning signs for several years: the growth rate did not recover after the financial crisis of 2008 and has been below the African average, the per capita murder rate has remained many times the American average, unemployment has stayed high (roughly 33 percent), and the country’s governance ratings have declined precipitously since the high point at the end of Nelson Mandela’s presidency in the late 1990s.

However, 2015 was, even judged by the country’s performance of the last few years, truly an annus horribulus for President Jacob Zuma and the ruling coalition, consisting of the African National Congress, the Congress of South African Trade Unions, and the South African Communist Party.  Throughout the year, the president was haunted by a seemingly endless set of revelations about overspending of public funds at his mansion in Nkandla and demands by the Economic Freedom Front to “pay back the money.”  In February, the controversy led to an astonishing scene of EFF members being forcibly removed from Parliament by police and private security guards when Zuma was trying to give his state of the nation speech.