Ray of sunlight

Article By: Raymond Ackerman

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 07:22

Like many of my contemporaries in the business world, I am frequently asked how I remain so bullish in the face of the many challenges that confront South Africa. Particularly, there is often a hint of incredulity that Pick n Pay should continue to invest so confidently in a commercial environment that is threatened by very worrying levels of crime and violence, political uncertainty and deteriorating services.

Unlike many of those who find little good to say about the state of our nation, I am, regrettably, old enough to remember graphically the sheer awfulness of South Africa in the seventies, eighties and early nineties. I recall the dawn raids on African families whose presence in urban areas was deemed to be illegal, the wickedness of the pass laws, the forced removals under the Group Areas Act and the economically suicidal application of race-based job reservation.

A far, far better place

And when I remember those things, I have no hesitation in saying that the South Africa of today is a far, far better place than it was before 1994. We live in a country that is governed not by the unchallengeable dictates of cabinet ministers or security chiefs, but by the entrenched principles of a progressive constitution which binds Parliament and citizen alike to a judicable bill of rights, a free press and an independent judiciary.

That is the kind of society towards which I strove for most of my adult life and in the expectation of which so much of my business career was directed. Along with many of my peers in the commercial world, I recognised many years ago that apartheid was not only inequitable and cruel, but an insurmountable obstacle to economic growth and national prosperity. It impacted negatively on the quality of life of our employees, crippled productivity, closed foreign markets and created an environment of community conflict in which corporate progress and planning was made all but impossible.

And now that it has gone, we are ethically obliged to bring to the building of a new nation precisely those energies and critical patriotism that we so successfully invoked to nudge society, government and opposition to change.

Dawning of democracy

The euphoria of the dawning of democracy was intoxicating and the birth of the rainbow nation seductive. But the exhilaration that accompanied the miracle our national liberation perhaps blinded us to the harsh realities of the transition that was to come. Few of us paused to reflect on the daunting task of reconstruction that awaited a country that had been torn apart and brutalised by decades of apartheid, deprivation, ethnic prejudice and a command economy.

It is only when one reflects on where we were in the darkest days of the last century, and on the poverty, lack of opportunity and political and economic paralysis that characterised our society, that we are able to appreciate the overwhelming magnitude of the difficulties that have faced us in building a new society from the tragedies of the old and recreating ourselves as a normally-functioning and thriving economy.

We can learn much from the experience of the United States’ Reconstruction after the Civil War. Like our own post-apartheid transformation, it was an era of unprecedented political conflict and of far-reaching changes in the nature of American government. It saw the passage of constitutional amendments that for the first time enshrined in American law the principle that the rights of citizens could not be denied because of race.

But it was not until the mid-twentieth century that America was able to come to terms with the political and social agenda of the Reconstruction and make a second attempt to erase the economic inequalities that originated in slavery and were reinforced by decades of segregation.

And then, earlier this month – in an extraordinary encounter with the Rubicon – millions of white Christians in the United States voted for a man with one Kenyan parent, that parent having been raised as a Muslim.