Is multi-racial South Africa sliding into destruction?

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): You can always count on Libyan dictator Moammar Qaddafi, like some perennially alienated teenager, to say the most extreme thing available. He was at it again last week at a conference in Tunis, urging Africans to drive white people out of the continent. "The white colonialists have no place in Africa and their presence is unlawful," said the Bad Boy of international politics, dressed in one of his most fetching designer robes.

But there may be no need to drive the whites out. In South Africa, the only part of the continent where there is still a large white population -- not 'colonialists', but people whose ancestors have lived there for generations and in most cases for centuries -- they are leaving of their own accord.

Trustworthy statistics are hard to find (mainly, one suspects, because the South African government is reluctant to collect them), but it seems likely that around ten percent of the country's five million whites have left since the end of apartheid in 1994. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many more are thinking of leaving or actively preparing to leave.

Those who leave are primarily the most highly skilled and educated, who find a ready welcome elsewhere: poorly educated and low-skilled whites stand little chance of emigrating. And it's not just whites who are leaving. Skilled black, Asian and Colored South Africans are also lining up for immigration visas to Britain, Canada, the US or Australia, for much the same reasons.

Crime, and particularly violent crime, seems utterly out of control in South Africa, and the economy is bumping along the bottom as the rand plunges ever lower against foreign countries. There is a pervasive sense that the political system is becoming less tolerant and drifting into dangerous waters -- and despite South Africa's recent out-of-court victory over the big pharmaceutical companies, the AIDS plague is going to wreak havoc with its population: over 20 percent of South Africans are HIV positive.

Two recent events underlined the speed with which the situation is deteriorating. One was last Tuesday, when 12-year- old AIDS activist Nkosi Johnson, who moved the nation and the world with his speech to last year's International AIDS Conference in Durban, was robbed at gunpoint in his own Johannesburg home. As the boy lay there, conscious but near death, armed men threatened to kill his nurse, ordered him to be silent, and stole his television, CD player and other valuables.

Several million South Africans have similar experiences each year, and tens of thousands are killed. Nor is there any sign that the tidal wave of crime is receding: the police, turned into a force of political repression in the apartheid era, have never recovered their professionalism or even their honesty.

And then on Wednesday, President Thabo Mbeki announced that three prominent members of the ruling African National Congress were under police investigation for a possible plot against him. Mbeki has always had a paranoid streak, but this quite unexpected turn of events suggested to many people that it is now getting the better of him.

The three men in question make no secret of the fact that they think Nelson Mandela could have found a better successor than Mbeki to lead the country. Former ANC secretary-general Cyril Ramaphosa actually stood against Mbeki for the leadership, and former provincial premiers Tokyo Sexwale and Mathews Phosa have openly criticized him too. All are still ANC members in good standing, but now work in private business. And the idea that they would plot a coup against Mbeki is ridiculous.

South Africa's independent media have treated Mbeki's allegations with contempt, explaining them as a pre-emptive move to thwart any plans that his old rival Cyril Ramaphosa might have to challenge Mbeki's leadership before the next election in 2004. But involving the police in this little intrigue is a new step downwards: as Douglas Gibson, chief whip of the opposition Democratic Alliance, put it: "Using the resources of the state to investigate whether senior ANC members want to get rid of Mbeki is quite wrong."

South Africans of every color live with the fear that their country, despite its high level of development and the promising start it made on a democratic future under Mandela, is somehow doomed to follow the grim pattern that has devastated its neighbors to the north. They look at war-torn Angola, at dirt- poor Mozambique, at an impoverished and tyrannized Zimbabwe that once seemed so promising, and they shudder with apprehension. So when Mbeki starts to sound even a little bit like Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe....

It is early days for such apocalyptic judgments. South Africa is still more miracle than disaster area. Its future once seemed destined to be a huge, unwinnable, endless racial civil war, like what happened in Lebanon at ten times the scale. Instead it has become a peaceful, multi-racial democracy whose biggest problems are a sky-high crime rate, a lackluster economy, and a somewhat wonky leader. This glass is at least half-full.

But perceptions matter a great deal in life, and if the country's skilled people continue to abandon it at the current rate, all its hopes for a more prosperous future will fail. Then the dire visions of calamity will become self-fulfilling prophecies. The two most urgent problems to get under control, if this is not to come to pass, are the crime rate and Thabo Mbeki's mouth.