The political colors of the once celebrated Rainbow Nation are running together to form an extremely murky and unattractive grey and there can be little doubt that South Africa is in serious trouble. It is not simply that President Jacob Zuma has himself become deeply compromised as a result of a whole series of corruption allegations. It now seems clear that a large part of the African National Congress establishment has been involved in payola, bribery and influence peddling on a massive scale. The evidence for this comes from a leaked hoard of emails between senior ANC people and the highly influential Gupta business family. These showed that the Guptas were given government information ahead of key announcements and also that they were able to influence the government appointments to state-run industries and even, emails appear to demonstrate, to the cabinet. Some in the ANC are endeavoring to push back saying that the message flow has been doctored by political enemies. This is unlikely to wash, since in one respect the ANC has no political enemies to speak of, and that is a large part of the country's problem. The Democratic Alliance, the one coherent opposition voice, appears to have lost its way and some suspect that it has been suborned by ANC backhanders. This week it turned on its former leader Helen Zille after she made the comment that colonialism had not been all bad for the country in that it had created much of the infrastructure that had allowed South Africa to become the strongest economy on the continent. Zille, current premier of Cape Province, is a former journalist whose courageous anti-apartheid campaigning included the exposure of the murder of Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko. She has been suspended by the party she helped found for an observation that in a sane political environment would be perfectly reasonable. She might have added that in the ANC's 27 years of increasing misrule, that infrastructure has begun to collapse. For example, state electricity supplier ESKOM has not built a single, new power station and the country has been blighted by economically catastrophic load shedding and power cuts. The major problem is that the ANC elite regard themselves as unaccountable and their hold on political power as unassailable. Unchallenged, its members have put personal enrichment ahead of the interests of their country. Recession has returned for the first time since 2009 and unemployment is now running at a record high. Ordinary South Africans, especially those in the townships, are in despair. Social tensions are rising, as is an already alarming crime wave. It was not supposed to be like this. When the anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela assumed the presidency, there was a widespread belief that the country's wealth, formerly concentrated in the hands of the white community, would be more evenly distributed. The Black Empowerment policy was supposed to bring this about. Instead, it led to financial featherbedding for ANC leaders, managerial incompetence and economic incoherence. Only radical change can now reverse the national decline. Calls for corruption inquiries are less important than recognition, even by dishonest ANC leaders, that the current environment is ultimately poisonous for everyone and simply has to be addressed. The besmirched Rainbow Nation desperately needs new leaders with vision and moderation. Indeed, it needs another Nelson Mandela.
