A Case of a Derailed South African Rainbow Nation

“I will always admire FDR for his courageous leadership and wisdom that freed Americans from the misery of “widespread unemployment, famine, and homelessness” visited upon them by of the Great Depression. But I will forever be saddened by the exclusion of certain members of the human family from experiencing the relief that the New Deal program delivered.” I was motivated to write the scholarship paper upon reading, in Alfred Emile Cornebise’s The CCC Chronicles: Camp Newspapers of the Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933-1942 about how the CCC “employed 300,000 young men to work in the Civilian Conservation Corps improving national and state parks, maintaining forest roads and trails, planting trees to prevent soil erosion and building levees and dams for flood control.” In Baraboo, Wisconsin, the Devil’s Lake State Park, where I walked almost 1 kilometer on frozen ice (for the first time), the green infrastructure was built by the CCC. In the process and contrary to the popular capitalist notions, “the program proved that the government must be meaningful actors in how the economy runs.” Last Sunday, South Africa celebrated 31 years of partial freedom from the stranglehold of apartheid. I say ‘partial’ because as Mandla J. Radebe correctly observed in his opinion piece in the Sunday Times (20 April 2025), “Apartheid didn’t die, it adapted.” In his book, The New Apartheid, author, Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh also emphatically posits that “apartheid did not die, it was privatized.” Sunday’s celebrations, if we can even call them that, took place at a critical moment in the history of our country. Accountability is dying a slow death. The ruction about the approval of the national budget by parliament continues. Since 2017, South Africa has been led by a tainted president whom some have rightly called “a diesel locomotive that takes time to warm up” and to live up to his ‘thuma mina’ promise. Meanwhile, our citizens are literally drowning from negative impacts of a changing climate: devastating rainfalls and forest fires. On 10 February 1990, a day before Nelson Mandela was unconditionally released from prison, where he had been for 27 years, a woman named Helen Bradford, presented a paper at the History Workshop at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. The title of the paper was “Getting Away with Slavery: Capitalist Farmers, Foreigners and Forced Labour in the Transvaal. C1920 – 1950.” Somewhere on page 12 of that paper, Bradford’s words captured a pending moment that would momentarily define South Africa after the Freedom Day of 27 April 1994: Our stillborn “Rainbow Nation,” that with the benefit of hindsight appears to have been a gambit that, in Bradford’s lexicon, was “mothered by myopia, fathered by compromise, and delivered by coercion”. Since the sudden death of that erstwhile fairytale “rainbow nation,” a ruse that was coined by former Anglican Archbishop Tutu, the way we, South Africans, now live, work and raise our families has become a burden on the mental health on our national population. Because of our wobbling mental fitness, since the advent of our ‘disguised plutocracy’, we’ve consistently allowed politicians and the organizations they represent to abuse, with impunity, our so-called inalienable rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution. Time and again, voters have allowed themselves to be used as voting fodder to sustain a system that treats them as second-class citizens in animal farm where all the citizens are equal, but some citizens are more equal than others. Ask any sober-minded South African and they will tell you, ours is a country where corruption is on complete autopilot despite our country spending more than R1 billion rands to create the façade of doing something. Even some of the heavy feeders at the trough also know, as well as the rest of us do, that our lived experiences of freedom are far removed from our expectations. Our parliament is full of questionable people with serious cases of corruption to answer. As we purportedly celebrated 31 years of freedom, many of the vital systems for our human survival and prosperity are unsustainable. Our educational system is dismally failing the majority of our children. The basic things that our citizens need to live productive lives—food, water, shelter, work and energy—are teetering on the brink of a complete collapse. Our obesity-producing food systems, road infrastructure systems, energy systems and health care systems are crumbling. Each and every one of these systems is failing and unsustainable. More importantly, each and every one of these failing systems sustain the inequality that is the rootstock on which our disguised plutocracy was grafted. In a so-called democracy that is governed by the rule of law, how can crime, gender-based violence, kidnapping and fraud be all considered normal? In a country where the president recently signed the Preservation and Development of Agricultural Land Bill into law, why is fertile agricultural land in the Eastern being allowed to be eroded into ‘dongas’ or overtaken by alien vegetation whilst scores of local youths are idling without employment? When will our government realize that “the movement towards Economic Democracy — a system of governance that puts capital and resources under democratic control and ownership — cannot happen without the people most impacted by the current economic paradigm.” In our case the poor on the urban edges and our vast rural communities. Most importantly, when will our rural citizens realize that the situations in which many find themselves is a clarion call for self-reliance. Because as Ralph Waldo Emerson warned, “When linguist Daniel Everett was learning from a hunter-gatherer community in the Brazilian rainforest, he observed a hunter that had brought home a sizable kill, too big to be eaten by just one family. Everett asked how he would store the excess. Smoking and drying techniques were well known; storing was possible. The hunter was puzzled by the question—store my meat? Why would he do that? Instead, he sent out an invitation to a feast, and soon the neighboring families were gathered around his fire. This seemed inefficient to Everett, who asked again: why didn’t the hunter store the