Waiting for the rains

By Isobel Frye

Johannesburg is dry and parched, the red earth waits for rejuvenation and our memories turn to the brilliance of purple jacaranda flowers to lift our souls and fill us with wonder and quiet moments of joy.

In the meantime, we continue to plod on in our daily lives. We open our papers and read of speeches, talks, launches and processes that should take us from our current state of indecisiveness to inspirational heights of certainty, plans for development, innovation and direction: politically, economically, socially and spiritually.
It sometimes appears as if we lack the confidence in ourselves to be able to soar to the levels of inspiration needed to know where we should go and how we should get there, and instead believe that this must happen by the wave of a wand. Our short history of being the “miracle nation” has perhaps wiped from our collective memory the fact that our transition was not a chance, but preceded by many years of sweat, sacrifice and disciplined hard work. Reading recent recollections by leaders of the almost insane investment of time and building relationships required to organise workers in a single factory into unions and a greater political consciousness, brings home the hard truths that progress does not come about through “political solutions”, but ceaseless and often, thankless, slog.

And so we have become a nation of people well sated in our analyses of what is not working in our development growth path, in the apparent failings of institutions that we fought for and built in the heady days of building the state to be the vehicle for our aspirations of transformation and equality, the uplifting and giddy principles that were laid down in our Constitution. But at the same time we appear too overwhelmed to lay tracks for structural transformation that will advance all of us out of the deliberate state of underdevelopment and stasis so carefully planned by the architects of apartheid.

We gaze with bewilderment at other “developing countries” that now dominate our technologically driven world, which develop most of the goods and their inputs that we use on a daily basis, and despair at what we need to do in order to reach those levels of production and outputs. We comfort ourselves by acknowledging that the world has changed since the days in which the newly industrialised countries were able to impose restrictive tariffs to develop home-grown technologies, we count the investments such nations received by the then bi-polar leaders of the Cold War and we retreat into depression and inertia.

We need to acknowledge a seeming contradiction. While we must see that time is running out for ourselves in terms of the need to move forward, the need to communicate an inclusive development for our nation and all who live in it, we also have to recognise that returns on our efforts to do so will take time, perhaps 20 or 30 years. However, in that time we need the boldness and the confidence to make choices of sectoral investments, skills advancement and positive trade relationships. To use the trite — we need to see the change that we want to effect and we need to channel resources to thinking and innovation, to trying out different approaches and to learn from all victories and defeats. And leaders need to communicate this to people who have begun to wonder how things will ever change for themselves and their families.

It is hoped that the new plans that are emerging from the state will rise above their antecedents. Space must be given for senior civil servants to apply themselves to apply solutions. Political solutions have a space, but it is not in the realm of advancing an inclusive developmental state.

When the rains come, and our wonder and joy blooms, let us also know that the storm water drains to capture the water have been cleared, and that water tanks have been installed to use, to nourish new growth.

Isobel Frye is the director of the Studies in Poverty and Inequality Institute