Irish Examiner view: Democracy will be tested in South Africa

South Africa must respond to the many challenges faced by what should be Africa’s most powerful and successful country

South African president Cyril Ramaphosa speaking at Freedom Day celebrations in Pretoria on April 27, marking the 30th anniversary of the country's first democratic election in 1994. Picture: Themba Hadebe/AP

During the Gaza crisis and, before it, the invasion of Ukraine, much publicity has been given to the views of the so-called Global South. 

A prominent player has been South Africa, whose application before the International Court of Justice to have Israel’s actions classified as a “genocide”, has won our backing, and in particular the support of the Tánaiste Micheál Martin.

Now, just over ten years after the death of its founding father, Nelson Mandela, it is South African democracy which is being put to the test with an election at the end of this month which Ireland’s Fergal Keane, reporting for the BBC, has described as “the most consequential since those first non-racial polls 30 years ago.” 

Mandela’s party, the African National Congress (ANC), has been in control over those three decades but burgeoning unemployment, civic violence and corruption and a never-ending energy crisis which commenced in 2007 threaten its overall majority.

It is a dangerous place to run for public office. In the Eastern region of KwaZulu-Natal more than 20 councillors have been murdered in the past year. More than 150 officials and elected representatives have been killed in a decade.

With the ANC being held to account for its unbroken control of the country, opposition parties are aligning to challenge its power and that of the president Cyril Ramaphosa, once general secretary of the mineworkers’ union and his party’s lead negotiator in the talks that ended apartheid.

Principal opposition comes from the mainstream Democratic Alliance, from the MK party headed by the problematic and disgraced former president Jacob Zuma, and from the Marxist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF).

In a nation where 36% of the black population is jobless, where three out of five young people are out of work, and where there are 84 murders each day, there is huge appetite for radical change when 28 million registered electors go to vote on Wednesday, May 29.

At a time when the impact of cultural boycotts to encourage political transformation is hotly debated it is worth remembering that it was 50 years ago this week that a Lions rugby team played its first game on a three-month tour of South Africa at a time of widespread condemnation of the apartheid regime.

That team, containing nine Irishmen, captained by Willie John McBride and coached by Syd Millar, defeated the Springboks and all provincial opposition. The decision by the Lions to cease touring South Africa between 1980 and 1997 is widely credited with increasing the sense of isolation which led to changing attitudes within the Afrikaner-dominated National Party.

Now it is the turn of the ANC to respond to major challenges in what should be Africa’s most powerful and successful country after decades of failure. The outcome will have a major impact on the geopolitics of the world.

Nemo cracks the Eurovision code

We can produce a new coda to Harry Lime’s famous observation in the classic post-war film noir The Third Man.

In Italy, said the black marketeer anti-hero, “for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace — and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock”. 

To which can now be added a victory in the most rancorous Eurovision Song Contest in history after a turbulent competition.

But we got a rather good winner, the first for Switzerland since Celine Dion in 1988, and a standout performance from that country’s non-binary entry Nemo with ‘The Code’. 

Even though the European Broadcasting Union had long since cleared the participation of Israel despite the war in Gaza, vociferous pro-Palestinian campaigners unsuccessfully urged participants to boycott the event. Now the show is over, demonstrators will want to move onto new fields. 

Within Ireland, they have achieved a notable success in persuading Trinity College Dublin to disinvest from Israeli companies operating in Gaza and to consider a wider withdrawal of all such financial arrangements. The leverage used by students was to block public access to the Book of Kells, an important source of revenue. 

Having achieved one set of objectives with this tactic, it will be interesting to see whether it is used again. If so, it will not be long before politicians and commentators start to question whether the faculty is the most appropriate steward for one of our great national treasures.

Modern tragedy of knife crime

When the funeral of 87-year-old grandfather Thomas O’Halloran, originally from Ennistymon, Co Clare, took place in London, it was attended by nearly 400 family members, friends, sympathisers, and representatives of the Irish community.

Mr O’Halloran was the gentle and popular pensioner who sat astride his mobility scooter while busking with his accordion to raise money for good causes.

This week, a UK court sentenced the habitual and mentally ill criminal who stabbed him to death on August 16, 2022, after O’Halloran had been collecting for victims of the war in Ukraine. We learned that Lee Byer, 45, had been released from Wormwood Scrubs Prison just days before, while suffering from delusions stimulated by the film The Hunger Games.

Judge Mark Lucraft, sentencing Byer to a hospital order with restrictions, described it as a “senseless” and “savage” killing of a “much-loved” man with “no provocation and no rational motive”. 

Truly a terrible tragedy and, with its overlap of state failure, a very modern one.