The Hidden Fence

It has been over two months since I last wrote a blog post. The reason for this is not that I wouldn’t have any interesting subjects, but I was rather busy organizing the next big move in my life: next month I will be relocating to California. I hope that, once settled down, I get again time to write some more blog posts, perhaps also a retrospective post about my year in South Africa.

From the subjects I still have in mind, I chose for now the most newsworthy one: the “Zuma elections” on 22 April. Of course we are here in a democratic country with a multitude of parties from which people can chose their favourite. Also the elections will most probably be fair in legal terms. Zuma won’t be elected with 100% of the votes, but his party, the African National Congress (ANC), will with the utmost probability win the elections and therefore he will become the next president of the Republic of South Africa.

Driving through the streets of Joburg, but also in other regions like KwaZulu-Natal or the Cape, most election posters are promoting the members of the ANC. Since there there is still a big percentage of illiterates in this country, those posters only have a picture of the candidate and a few words in any of the contry’s 11 languages (mostly English, Afrikaans, Zulu and Xhosa) on a yellow background; yellow beeing the ANC’s main colour.

The world is of course mostly interested in these elections because of Zuma’s past: over 700 corruption charges have been layed down about a week ago, so Zuma is officially no more a criminal. Knowing that even the president-to-be has (or had) corruption charges against him, is not really promising for the future of South Africa. Besides crime, corruption is the biggest issue this country has to face; or even the biggest since the whole crime problem results mainly from a over-corrupt police system.

Several people have enthused to me about how the country was before “the change” - meaning the 1994 end of the Appartheid regime. I don’t know this country well enough to judge those statements, but it seems to me they were at least right in one point: the political system as well as the whole administration must have worked much better than it does nowadays.

It will be interesting to observe how much better (or worse?) the situation will get under Zuma. What I’m the most concerned, is how the situation will change for the whites in South Africa. At least in Johannesburg a majority of the people I’m in contact with, want to leave the city or the country. The reason for this is to a large degree the criminality in and around the city which has of course a very bad influence on the quality of life. Those whites who are lucky, already have an (inherited) foreign passport, the others try to get one by studying overseas or getting a job for an international company.

We will know the outcome of the elections next week and the world will judge the results of the Zuma government at latest in 2010 when the FIFA Soccer World Cup takes place in South Africa.