South Africa has been going through some hard times in the past few months. Labour and social unrest, ratings downgrades and fierce criticism of the ANC government. The roots of this appear to be fourfold: first, there are genuine grievances associated with real deprivation within communities; second, marked failure in a number of instances by various levels of government to deliver services to people; third, a 'conspiracy' by various local and international structures to discredit the government, and president Zuma in particular; last, but not least, unrealistic expectations by citizens that deprivation wrought by decades and centuries of apartheid and colonial policies could be wiped out within a period of less than 20 years.
No country in the world has thus far been able to address poverty and lack of services within such a short time frame after attaining freedom and/or liberation and/or democracy. Even well-established democracies (some never colonized) are, centuries down the line, still grappling with these issues. The world economic melt-down has also done the SA government no favours. This has put a strain on our evidently limited resources. Rural/urban migration and illegal immigration also do not help.
It is clearly very important for the government to drastically improve its service delivery to citizens and to minimize wastage of our limited resources. But equally important is to deal more directly with the issue of unrealistic expectations as they are clearly unsustainable. Opponents of the ANC government seize on this to perpetuate the myth that the government has "failed to deliver, 18 years after democracy", but the reality is that (blatant waste and corruption aside), no government would have done much better given South Africa's history.
Unless the issue of unrealistic expectations is confronted, more social unrest is still to come.
