World View: "From the two nations to the two economies". This slogan sums up a lot that has been happening in South Africa over the last 10 years during its transition from apartheid to democracy, writes Paul Gillespie.
It is used by senior people in the African National Congress to describe the stages of political development they have gone through since then, and to identify the pressing problems they face in delivering on mass expectations as the country goes to vote on April 14th, two weeks before celebrations to mark the first decade of liberation.
The ANC is universally expected to win the elections and to form another coalition with smaller parties; but there is a discernible political disenchantment among younger people, based on a frustration with progress in dealing with unemployment, AIDS, crime and the crisis in Zimbabwe, recurrent themes in criticisms of the government's record.
Holidaying in Cape Town last week gave an opportunity to listen in on this political conversation/argument. President Thabo Mbeki, in his state-of-the-union address to parliament, quoted repeatedly from Nelson Mandela's inaugural address to the first democratically elected parliament on themes of nation-building and reconciliation.
He quoted, too, a recent article by the Afrikaans writer Rian Malan: "On this day, 10 years ago, I was hiding gold coins under the floorboards and trying to get my hands on a gun before the balloon went up. As a white South African, I was fully expecting war . . . In my view, peace would never come. There was too much history, too much pain and anger . . .
"It is infinitely worse to receive than to give, especially if one is arrogant and the gift is something big, like mercy or forgiveness. The gift of 1994 was so huge that I choked on it and couldn't say thank you. But I am not too proud to say it now."
Mandela, now 85, remains a huge and active presence in South Africa, a powerful symbol of the successful nation-building experiment that was the centrepiece of the first coalition government from 1994 to 1999. He was fully aware of the dangers of a white backlash led by disaffected elements of the military-security establishment. So he set out to win the hearts and minds of the country's 4.3 million whites, now a political minority in a country shared democratically with 40 million blacks, four million people of mixed race (coloureds), and one million of Indian or Asian background. (There is still no escaping these apartheid categories).
As Allister Sparks, the South African journalist and author puts it, Mandela's campaign of reassurance, rooted in the ANC's long tradition of non-racialism, "won the hearts and minds of almost the entire white population and earned Mandela worldwide recognition as one of history's great peace-makers."
The second stage came when Thabo Mbeki took over as President in 1999. Its themes have been black advancement - consolidating the delivery of basic facilities to the ANC's core constituency and penetrating the hitherto closed white spaces of South Africa's first world economy by empowering a black middle-class to advance within it and open up new sectors of entrepreneurship.
Mbeki streamlined and centralised the cabinet system, somewhat marginalising the parliament, and advised the broad ANC church to concentrate on organisational work rather than on perpetual policy debates. He is a much more aloof figure than Mandela and will be judged by outcomes rather than charisma.
In his speech last week he spelled out the main achievements of these 10 years of delivering on promises and expectations. Housing, electrification, water supply and sanitation, education and child nutrition top the social list, in an impressive set of figures.
Economically, the stress is on the control of inflation (running at 4 per cent), growth averaging 3 per cent, the longest period of consistent growth since the 1940s, and substantially reduced public sector debt, now less than 50 per cent of GDP. These are orthodox economic indices, however necessary they have been to reconstruct and reinvigorate, in Sparks's words, "a derelict economy, stagnant, inward-looking and deep in debt".
They arise from the strategic choice made by the ANC-led coalition in 1996 to adopt a neo-liberal macroeconomic model, akin to a structural adjustment programme, with tight fiscal discipline and a focus on debt reduction.
The head of the ANC's policy and research office, Michael Sachs, explaining the decision to Paul Kingsnorth, author of a book on globalisation and resistance to it, said no other revolutionary movement had come to power in the US-dominated, unipolar world that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
"We achieved democracy in 1994 and immediately had to confront the issue of globalisation. In that kind of context you have the adoption of conservative macro-economic policies . . . I have no doubt that if we had embarked on some kind of Keynesian socialist project in 1994, we would have been defeated by now, as the ANC. Macroeconomic stability, in a globalised world, is the condition for us to continue our objectives."
The trouble with this is that without double the rate of growth so far achieved, much more foreign investment than has materialised and an opening up of international markets it is impossible to generate sufficient resources for redistribution (a similar problem confronts Lula's reformist government in Brazil).
South Africa's two economies are now highly polarised: one is integrated in the developed world, the other remains in the poorest of the poor, with the gap growing; "the biggest threat to the country's long-term security", according to Sparks. He has compared them to a bus with no connecting stairs between the new multiracial middle-class riding comfortably on the upper deck, while the black underclass is crammed into a squalid lower one.
He recommends that South Africa emulate Roosevelt's New Deal of the 1930s with a massive public works programme to provide jobs and skill training for the country's eight million unemployed, building at the same time an infrastructure of lasting benefit.
It remains to be seen whether Mbeki's next government will have the courage to propose it and whether international capital would look sympathetically on such a shift from neo-liberal orthodoxy to a more social democratic policy.