PUBLIC CONFIDENCE
ISMAIL LAGARDIEN: NDP a starting point for rebuilding trust
Of all the things that went wrong under the administration of Jacob Zuma, the erosion of trust in the state may well be the most difficult thing to turn around. We should be a bit more honest though — without appearing to absolve Zuma from wrongdoing at all — and acknowledge that there has been a general, ideologically driven decline of trust in the state since the late 1970s and early 1980s. This general distrust may be associated with the Thatcher-Reagan revolution, which emboldened free marketers and market fundamentalists and quite rapidly strengthened finance capitalism, all of which triumphed, albeit briefly, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. By the late 1990s, based in part on the successes of the East Asian Tigers and in part on the collapse of states in various parts of the world, there have been serious attempts to determine how states can be brought back in, as it were, and become more capable and effective in the provision of public goods and services, and evaluate...
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