The 2020 American elections: a wakeup call to South Africa?

The recent elections of Joe Biden to succeed Donald Trump could  be a wake-up call to the South African electorate.  However, the concrete answer could still be two years away and expected in 2024, when South Africa will hold the next presidential elections.

Africa in general, has in the past been characterised by dictatorship and hegemonic rule where cabals control state power and use it to syphon state resources with impunity. On the other side, America had always been considered by many as an example of democracy where citizens were embroiled with possibilities from all fronts. The image that America portrayed to the rest of the world was in the past four years of Trump’s rule quite the opposite of what it used to be. America is said to have increased racial tensions during the four years of Trump’s rule emanating from the way the President denigrated other American races which were not white. What non historians forget is that far over 50% of American population immigrated from one place or another around the world depending on what date you start from.

According to the US Census Bureau, “the current total population of Native Americans in the United States is 6.79 million, which is about 2.09% of the entire population”. It is also documented that 50% of the current Americans have one of their ancestors having lived in the United States in the 1800. To cut statistics out, it is a fact that America was built from the sweat of immigrants and this population cannot be ridiculed, denigrated and constantly harassed as has been the case in the previous four years of Trump’s rule. Any American citizen who came from East, West, South or North of the globe, ought not to be treated as a second class citizen and the 2020 presidential elections in the United states has proven that once one tries to create a wedge between the different classification of Americans, the citizens will answer with their only weapon which is the vote.

Coming back to the South African lesson to be learned, South Africa in 1994, came from 300 years of Apartheid rule. The kind of rule that was based on divide and rule. The rule that created separate developments where black races were forcibly removed from their homes and grouped in areas which were predominantly barren and to make matters worse, denied land ownership of the same barren land. It is not uncommon in South Africa, to find black populations that do not have an idea how peanuts grow, whether they are plucked from trees like coffee or whether these peanuts grow like beans. Separate development policy was racist where black locations were supposed to be far from metropolitan areas and less developed compared to areas inhabited by white races. The education system was racially divided where black races were given inferior education and forced to learn in the language of their oppressor known as Afrikaans.

Fast forward, the 1994 democratic elections in South Africa brought hope especially to the black race that was treated as second class citizens in their motherland. This hope also ushered in reconciliation brought by the truth and reconciliation commission where some of the oppressors confessed the wrongs they committed and asked the victims to forgive them. This hope and enthusiasm lasted until corruption, nepotism, political infighting, and greed took the front seat in the ruling party. State resources were plundered, incompetent civil servants who were politically connected run state institutions, and the economy was generally run down until recently when South Africa was classified as junk status by the international rating agencies Moodys and, Standard and Poors.

The parallels with the current America come in the way current South Africans have almost lost hope. State institutions have been run to the ground because of incompetent individuals who were politically appointed to run them. Not because South Africa does not have qualified civil servants that are well educated and have the right skills to run these state institutions,  but because the skilled elite  do not command any political connections. A number of state hospitals are in a sorry state, municipal services are a shadow of what they used to be, roads are riddled with potholes in a number of places in the country due to lack of maintenance. All this is due to corruption and state resources have been plundered by a few individuals. Unemployment figures are climbing day by day, where graduates are loitering the streets without jobs and racial tensions are at their worst since the advent of democracy in South Africa. Former deputy finance Minister Mcebesi Jonas put it recently, that the country is currently in a political and economic crisis. Mcebesi Jonas went further to indicate that the country has gone back to pre-1992 conditions. That is conditions before the hope that the 1994 brought to South Africans.

The South African population is currently divided along racial lines, and incidents of Xenophobia have increased simply because of a society that is unhappy about how the country’s borders have become porous with more and more illegal immigrants coming into the country to compete on the meagre resources that are left to the population. The porous borders are made worse by corrupt home affairs officials some of whom assist illegal immigrants to obtain documents illegally in exchange of some cash. A commission of enquiry in South Africa was set up to unearth the rampant corruption which was enabled from the highest political offices in the country and has left the country with an enormous external debt to pay, an empty purse to cater for current needs and an angry and hungry population without jobs, income or food.

The question is whether the South African population has learnt anything from the 2020 American presidential elections, where Americans have decided that enough is enough and voted in their millions to change the status quo for the benefit of Americans. It is the South Africans who can decide to change the status quo and the current unemployment, squandering of state resources, improve race relations, prosecute corrupt government officials and “make South Africa great again”. What makes this an enormous task however, is that the vast population is rural and cannot stand up for their rights unlike in America.

Rural communities lack understanding of the political influence on the economics of the country and unemployment.  For them, increasing social grants makes more sense. As one observer put it, “removing the incumbent in the United States during this election is a short-term solution. The long-term solution which is more difficult is fixing the education system that created so many people ignorant enough to have voted him in, in the first place”. Likewise, the problem South Africa is facing is educating its rural masses to understand that, “if you give a man a piece of fish, you will feed him for that day but if you teach him how to fish, you will feed him for life”.

It will be in 2024 when we can get the answer whether the American 2020 elections had any wake-up call to South Africans.

George Nsamba is a commentator on African affairs and specialist in risk management and auditing based in Johannesburg South Africa