GARETH VAN ONSELEN: The age of uncertainty
The lack of imagination in SA’s leadership is even more disturbing than its ignorance. The country has become a one-dimensional universe held together by little more than the anxiety it generates
A great many contemporary problems would seem to have placed SA into a kind of stasis. The biggest of them all, the ANC’s national conference in December, is perhaps defining on this front. It looms large and its consequences are probably profound, but we do not know how and why it is all going to play out. And so we wait. That kind of uncertainty is replicated elsewhere. President Jacob Zuma has been the subject of a great unknown since 2009: the charges against him were initially dropped, but their reinstatement has been doggedly pursued by the DA ever since. The judicial wheels turn slowly. There are huge, ever-developing narratives unfolding: "state capture" and the role of the Guptas, for example. For three years, we have read snippets from this story on an almost daily basis, each one contributing to a bigger picture. But we don’t yet know the full horror, only that it is bad, and that there is more to come. Grand policy proposals, like the National Development Plan, seem to b...
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