Durban Notebook

No one likes uncertainty and in Britain we’ve got more than our fair share. But spare a thought for South Africa, where the uncertainty is in danger of morphing into national paralysis. ‘What are your plans for the future?’ I ask a friend who lives near Durban. ‘We have no plans. We might be packing up next year and heading out.’ A lot rests on next year. The general election appears to be set for May and with every day the pressure on President Cyril Ramaphosa increases. The 65-year-old millionaire is stuck between the rock of his more militant ANC supporters and the hard place of those impatient for root-and-branch change. Which means stamping out corruption, tackling unemployment (some commentators put it at 40 per cent), dealing with violent crime, resolving the redistribution of land issue and rehabilitating, variously, the tax collection agencies, police investigation teams, security firms and the prosecution service. That’s for starters. No wonder Ramaphosa is lying low. ‘I am going to vote for the ANC for the first time in my life and just hope Ramaphosa wins a thumping majority and then sets about rebuilding this country,’ says my friend’s husband. ‘Right now it could go either way.’

The lying-low policy is not proving easy. I awake to headlines about how the president’s finance minister, Nhlanhla Nene, has resigned over links to the notorious Gupta family, who allegedly controlled cabinet appointments and state contracts during Jacob Zuma’s disastrous nine-year presidency. Within hours, the rand falls and the prospects of the appalling Julius Malema, leader of the far-left Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), seem brighter. Then comes news that the Zulu king, Goodwill Zwelithini, is forming an alliance with a hard-line Afrikaner group to protect tribal territory and that ‘anyone who wants to be elected by us must come and kneel here and commit that [he] will never touch our land’.