One thing is certain, if the difficult decisions are not taken now, the future looks bleak. Iron will is required to stare down those who want to destroy the country.
The election of President Cyril Ramaphosa in December 2017 was a victory, and progressive South Africans breathed a well-deserved collective sigh of relief. But the President was almost immediately burdened with the insurmountable expectations attached to ‘Ramaphoria’. When, after 100 days in office, he had not delivered the impossible, newspaper headlines screamed ‘From Dawn to Dust – The Implosion of Ramaphoria’ and ‘Ramaphoria to Ramaphobia’, and so on.
Jonas observed this with deep concern. Such was our enthusiasm for everything to be all right, and such was our relief that state capture had not pushed us over the precipice, that we had failed to acknowledge the complexities that had driven us to the point of near collapse. It was precisely this, which Jonas observed sat at the heart of our current system: that politicians sat at the centre of our economy and in so doing put politics at the centre of economic policy making and implementation. As a result, the short-term management of constituencies and the retention of political power and control – determined by our electoral cycles – had come to define our political and economic trajectory. A long-term inclusive growth agenda had become incidental.
During the course of 2018 and 2019, Jonas delivered many speeches and published articles to shine the light on his deep concerns about the direction the country was taking.