Författare: Gemma Ware Head of Audio

Some young South Africans have begun to question Nelson Mandela’s legacy, and the choices made in the transition to democracy after the end of apartheid in 1994. Some have even called him a “sellout”.

To mark 30 years since South Africa’s post-apartheid transition began, The Conversation Weekly podcast is running a special three-part podcast series, What happened to Nelson Mandela’s South Africa?

In this final episode of the series, we talk to two academics about the way Mandela is viewed by young South Africans today, and the challenges facing the African National Congress (ANC), which has governed the country for three decades, and its current president, Cyril Ramaphosa.

Young people make up 34% of South Africa’s population. Many of them were born after 1994.

Known as the “born free” generation, they never lived through the persecution of apartheid. And they’re not afraid to question the state of the country they’ve inherited.

“There’s this grappling of the new generation trying to understand why South Africa still looks the way that it does,” explains Sithembile Mbete, a lecturer in political science at the University of Pretoria.

I think that there’s a revision or a review of Nelson Mandela’s legacy, mainly just from a dissatisfaction with the present and seeing the persistence of inequality of all sorts of manifestations – of white supremacy and racism and then all of the big political issues that we have for young people… and you’ve seen then a backlash to that amongst young people who are, like, why can’t we criticise him? Why can’t we criticise the decisions that were made?

Principal among the issues facing young people, she says, is unemployment. At the end of 2023, the unemployment rate for young South Africans between the ages of 15 and 34 was 44%. Mbete says that young people are asking serious questions about the way the economy is structured, but they’re not yet playing enough of a role in shaping the country. She adds:

Our expectations of what could have been done in the past are too high, but then our expectations of what we should be re-imagining in the present for the future are too low.

Elections looming

South Africans head to the polls on 29 May in a closely fought election in which polls suggest the ANC may, for the first time since 1994, lose the electoral majority needed to form a government.

Says Richard Calland, an associate professor in public law at the University of Cape Town, who recently co-wrote a book assessing South Africa’s post-apartheid heads of state:

We’re coming to the end of that period of domination by the ANC now; we’re into the period of what I call the second transition.

Despite the electoral dominance of the ANC over the last 30 years, says Calland, the party has had leaders of very different character, from Mandela to Thabo Mbeki, Kgalema Motlanthe, Jacob Zuma and now Cyril Ramaphosa.

Ramaphosa has had the very difficult task of rebuilding the state, rebuilding confidence in public ethics. And it’s really a tough battle. It’s like Sisyphus pushing and pushing that big stone up the hill. And it’s going to take quite a long time, I think, to recover lost ground.

Listen to our interviews with Richard Calland and Sithembile Mbete on The Conversation Weekly in the third and final episode of our What happened to Nelson Mandela’s South Africa? series. And read more coverage of the 30th anniversary of South Africa’s democratic transition from The Conversation Africa.

A transcript of this episode will be available shortly.

Disclosure statement

Sithembile Mbete has received grant funding for research on South African foreign policy from the National Research Foundation, National Institute of Social Science and Social Science Research Council. She’s received research support on South African democracy from the Open Society Foundation and the Ford Foundation. Richard Calland is a partner at The Paternoster Group: African Political Insight. He is also a member of the Advisory Council of the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution.

Credits

Newsclips in this episode from ITV News, CNBC Africa and SABC News.

Special thanks for this series to Gary Oberholzer, Jabulani Sikhakhane, Caroline Southey and Moina Spooner at The Conversation Africa. This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Mend Mariwany, with production assistance from Katie Flood. Gemma Ware is the executive producer. Sound design was by Eloise Stevens, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Stephen Khan is our global executive editor, Alice Mason runs our social media and Soraya Nandy does our transcripts.

You can find us on Instagram at theconversationdotcom or contact the podcast team directly via email. You can also subscribe to The Conversation’s free daily email here.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. Läs mer…

Five years after his momentous election as South African president, Nelson Mandela stepped down after one term in office in 1999. Thabo Mbeki, his deputy, took over the mantle of the post-apartheid transition. Mbeki would lead the country for the next nine years, a period of relatively high economic growth which enabled South Africans to begin to taste the fruits of freedom.

To mark 30 years since South Africa’s post-apartheid transition began, The Conversation Weekly podcast is running a special three-part podcast series, What happened to Nelson Mandela’s South Africa?

In this second episode of the series, we talk to two experts about the economic policies introduced to transform the country under Mbeki, and the turmoil of the presidency of Jacob Zuma that followed.

When Mandela took over as president of South Africa in 1994, the country’s economy was emerging from a long recession.

“The immediate period after the democratic transition in 1994 the African National Congress (ANC) ran a programme of austerity, that aimed to reduce spending and, at the same time, reorganise the state,” explains Michael Sachs, an economics professor at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Then from the early 2000s, as the economic situation improved and South Africa capitalised on a global commodities boom, the government began to expand its fiscal policy, in particular extending two social grants, the old age grant and the child support grant.

At the same time, a policy of black economic empowerment – which included skills development and preferential procurement for black people – was formalised under the Mbeki administration. Sachs explains the rationale behind these policies was to redress the historical injustice of apartheid:

All of the property in the country and particularly productive property is owned by a single ethnic group, which is white people – that’s essentially the situation we were in 1994. And so you had a government now that was accountable to a majority that was poor and black. It’s a no-brainer that you’re going to have to find ways of transferring ownership of that capital.

The Zuma years

In 2008, Mbeki’s presidency came to an end when the ANC recalled him, paving the way for the ascension of his successor, Jacob Zuma, after the 2009 national and provincial elections. Zuma’s years in office unleashed what many see as a significant turning point in South Africa’s democratic history.

Allegations of state capture and corruption dogged the Zuma presidency, particularly centred around his relationship with three businessmen called the Gupta brothers.

Mashupye Maserumule, a professor of public affairs at Tshwane University who is writing a book about Zuma, says that although Zuma’s presidency “started well”, with a National Development Plan, “the better part of his presidency was characterised by a systematic destruction of the country”.

He destroyed the ANC … but at the same time also we need to emphasise that the ANC has in many ways … allowed itself to be destroyed by Jacob Zuma because very old organisations, such as the ANC can only be destroyed if it is willing to be destroyed.

Listen to our interviews with Mashupye Maserumule and Michael Sachs on The Conversation Weekly in the second episode of our What happened to Nelson Mandela’s South Africa? series.

A transcript of this episode will be available shortly.

Disclosure statement

Mashupye Maserumule has received funding from the National Research Foundation. He is a member of the National Planning Commission and the South African Association of Public Administration and Management. Michael Sachs coordinates the Public Economy Project, which receives funding from the Gates Foundation. He was a member and employee of the ANC in the 1990s and 2000s, and later on a government official.

Credits

Newsclips in this episode from AP Archive, Euronews,
SABC News
and AlJazeera English.

Special thanks for this series to Gary Oberholzer, Jabulani Sikhakhane, Caroline Southey and Moina Spooner at The Conversation Africa. This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Mend Mariwany, with production assistance from Katie Flood. Gemma Ware is the executive producer. Sound design was by Eloise Stevens, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Stephen Khan is our global executive editor, Alice Mason runs our social media and Soraya Nandy does our transcripts.

You can find us on Instagram at theconversationdotcom or contact the podcast team directly via email. You can also subscribe to The Conversation’s free daily email here.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. Läs mer…

Kids ask the coolest questions! And on The Conversation’s Curious Kids podcast we get the brainiest people we can to answer them!

Every week, a curious kid joins host Eloise to ask the world’s top researchers their burning question, whether it’s about space, dinosaurs, trees or even why their dog is just sooooo cute.

Episode 1 of our first season lands on 21 April. Listen to a taste of what’s in store in our trailer and subscribe so you don’t miss out!

The Conversation’s Curious Kids podcast is published in partnership with FunKids, the UK’s children’s radio station.

Email your question to curiouskids@theconversation.com or record it and send your question to us directly at https://funkidslive.com/curious.

And explore more articles from our Curious Kids series on The Conversation. Läs mer…

It was a moment many South Africans never believed they’d live to see. On 10 May 1994, Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as president of a democratic South Africa, ending the deadly and brutal white minority apartheid regime.

To mark 30 years since South Africa’s post-apartheid transition began, The Conversation Weekly podcast is running a special three-part podcast series, What happened to Nelson Mandela’s South Africa?

In the first episode, two scholars who experienced the transition at first hand reflect on the initial excitement around Mandela’s election, the priorities of his African National Congress (ANC) in the transition and the challenges that lay ahead for South Africa as it set out to define its post-apartheid future.

In the months leading up to South Africa’s 1994 elections, Steven Friedman was seconded to work in the monitoring division of the Independent Electoral Commission. It was a tense period, he remembers:

The actual experience of working in the commission was incredibly challenging, I think, for everybody involved, and quite scary at times … I remember looking down from my office at the street where large numbers of Inkatha Freedom Party members were marching in an attempt in effect to stop the election, and wondering whether they were going to storm the building.

The Inkatha Freedom Party didn’t storm the building, but there was a lot of pre-election violence and an estimated 20,000 people were killed.

Today, Friedman is a professor of political studies at the University of Johannesburg and an expert in South Africa’s political transition. In his work, he’s argued that the role of the ANC in overthrowing apartheid has been overblown.

To be blunt, the ANC didn’t liberate the country … it was a combination of a variety of factors … I’m not saying they played no role at all, but I think it was common among ANC people at the time, and I think remains part of ANC mythology, to vastly overestimate the ANC’s role in internal resistance.

Friedman says it’s “easy to romanticise” Mandela, but he stresses he was hugely important in the transition.

Mandela played a huge role at the time, but he’s not coming back. And as long as we expect somebody like him to come back, we remain in a cul de sac … The downside to the Mandela phenomenon is that we spent a lot of time over the last 30 years, particularly when things got bad, really blaming the fact that the Messiah is no longer here.

A new kind of security

One of the biggest challenges facing the new ANC-led government after 1994 was reform of the security services, which had enforced the brutal apartheid regime under a highly militarised state. Sandy Africa, an associate professor of political sciences at the University of Pretoria, explains that “violence had been so integral to upholding the apartheid system.” A former student activist and ANC member, Africa was brought into the new ANC administration as head of a training facility called the Intelligence Academy.

By the time that the 1990s arrived, there began to emerge a consensus that in a democratic society, the security forces would have to play a very different role. That was certainly not a repressive one, but one where they really served as protectors of the people and their rights and their interests.

Africa says that there were real fears that the security forces would reject the changes. “If there was going to be a coup from any quarter, it would have been from that quarter,” she says, but in the end “the enlightened forces prevailed”.

Fears of those who thought that they had too much to lose were assuaged by sunset clauses – essentially promises that they would have relatively soft landings, that there would be no retribution for the atrocities committed under apartheid, and that, in fact, reconciliation would be the order of the day, rather than anything else.

Listen to interviews with Steven Friedman and Sandy Africa on The Conversation Weekly in the first episode of our What happened to Nelson Mandela’s South Africa? series.

A transcript of this episode will be available shortly.

Disclosure statement

Steven Friedman and Sandy Africa do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Credits

Newsclips in this episode from SABC News and AP News.

Special thanks for this series to Gary Oberholzer, Jabulani Sikhakhane, Caroline Southey and Moina Spooner at The Conversation Africa. This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Mend Mariwany, with production assistance from Katie Flood. Gemma Ware is the executive producer. Sound design was by Eloise Stevens, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Stephen Khan is our global executive editor, Alice Mason runs our social media and Soraya Nandy does our transcripts.

You can find us on Instagram at theconversationdotcom or contact the podcast team directly via email. You can also subscribe to The Conversation’s free daily email here.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. Läs mer…