No meltdown — but a deep sense of unease

On the eve of South Africa’s election, Janice Warman says its economy remains relatively attractive to investors, despite doubts about incoming president Jacob Zuma

In South Africa, everything is not as it seems. If you drive along the edge of the Atlantic Ocean from Muizenberg in Cape Town, you will see a sea of glittering shanty roofs that seems to stretch all the way up to Table Mountain — the vast slum that is Khayelitsha.

Drive in and it looks different. There is electrification, and portable toilets. There are two-lane metalled roads as well as dirt tracks. Every few hundred yards there is a shipping container that is home to a business — a shop, a barber’s, a car wash — and perhaps most astonishing of all, there is a tranche of brand-new houses with solar heating. Stop and talk to the inhabitants, and you find an easy cheerfulness combined — despite this evidence of progress — with general disillusion with how little the ANC government has done. Two young men who are tinkering with a car say that in next week’s elections they will vote for COPE, the new political party formed in December by disaffected members of the ANC.

Likewise, the country as a whole. South Africa has reasons to be cheerful. Despite its domestic problems of poverty, inequality, HIV/Aids and violent crime, it is managing to maintain some growth in the teeth of global recession.

After the votes cast on 22 April are counted, there seems no doubt that the new president will be the populist Jacob Zuma, the former Zulu herd boy who had faced charges of corruption (dropped earlier this month) and rape (of which he was acquitted in 2006) and who is nonetheless the object of extraordinary devotion from his followers.