In 1994, we the cheering minions of South Africa, stood with tear in eye and lump in throat, as Nelson Mandela proclaimed a new and democratically free nation on the African continent.
With the abhorrence of forty-eight years of Apartheid Rule forgotten and with the world in awe of the democratic miracle which had occurred, we South Africans faced a new era of prosperity, freedom and renewal.
The Apartheid Government had almost bankrupted the country to maintain a white only society to the exclusion of people of colour. That endeavour had made South Africa the most disparate nation on earth and had, in the process, incurred the moral wrath and indignation of the free world.
At his inauguration ceremony Nelson Mandela said:
|
‘In the 1980s the African National Congress was still setting the pace, being the first major political formation in South Africa to commit itself firmly to a Bill of Rights, which we published in 1990. The milestones give concrete expression to what South Africa can become. They speak of a constitutional, democratic, and political order in which, regardless of colour, gender, religion, political opinion or sexual orientation, the law will provide for the equal protection of all citizens. They project |
|
|
a democracy in which the government, whomever that government may be, will be bound by a higher set of rules, embodied in a constitution, and it will not be able to govern the country as it pleases. |
|
Democracy is based on the majority principle. This is especially true in a country such as ours where the majority have been systematically denied their rights. At the same time, democracy also requires that the rights of political and other minorities be safeguarded’. – Nelson Mandela
Despite the euphoria of having attained political freedom, the new nation faced an uphill battle to correct the social and economic irregularities of the past. The new government, under the leadership of the forgiving and democratically inclined Nelson Mandela, was equal to the challenge and, under a Constitution reckoned to be one of the most progressive amongst the democratic countries of the world, they began the process of healing the ailing nation.
|
|
Half a century of apartheid and a much longer period of legally enforced racial discrimination had left most black South Africans poor and undereducated. The reliance on a low-wage work force, especially in the country's mines but also in other areas of the economy, left South Africa without a significant consumer class among its black majority. Instead, nearly one-half of the population in the mid-1990s |
|
lived below internationally determined minimum-subsistence levels. Nearly fifty years of Verwoerdian "Bantu education" left the country short of skills and unable to generate the sort of labour force that could produce an "Asian miracle" along the lines of the skilled-labour-dependent industries of South Korea or Taiwan. |
|
