By Clare Byrne Feb 8, 2010, 5:04 GMT
Johannesburg - The image of former South African president Nelson Mandela walking out of prison after 27 years on February 11, 1990, is one of the defining moments of our time.
The choice facing the African National Congress (ANC) and Mandela in 1990 was between hard or soft power as the best means to overthrow the racist apartheid regime.
Mandela, particularly, insisted on the latter option and engaged the white minority government in three years of negotiations that culminated in black South Africans taking power at the polls, without a fight.
Today, South Africa faces a new set of choices, which will determine whether the work begun in February 1990 can be completed, or at least advanced.
The ANC's objective, as Mandela stated on the day of his release, was two-fold: emancipate black South Africans both politically and economically.
Twenty years later, all South Africans have a vote, but most blacks remain stranded by poverty in the sprawling townships of tin shacks they were forced to inhabit during apartheid.
One in four people of working age (24.5 per cent) is jobless, according to official statistics, and 75 per cent of those are under 35.
Among the under-35s, 70 per cent have never had a job - a stain on the record of the ANC, which oversaw a decade of strong growth until 2008, but spectacularly failed to make a dent in unemployment.
A heavily funded but woeful education system, which is still struggling to shake off the impact of apartheid laws that dumbed down education for blacks, and is stuffed with underqualified, underpaid teachers, has been blamed for producing a largely unemployable workforce.
Meanwhile, in the absence of a stab at a job, many young men turn to crime to make ends meet.
With around 50 people slain every day - one of the world's highest murder rates - and another 50 surviving an attempted killing, insecurity continues to cast a shadow over daily life and drive a wedge between the increasingly mixed middle class and an ever more disgruntled black underclass.
The gap between rich and poor is growing, even as the government steps up social spending.
Last year, South Africa pipped Brazil to become the world's most unequal society in income terms, as measured by the Gini coefficient.
As the feel-good factor of the 1990s fizzles, the popular appetite has also dwindled for the sweeping gestures of forgiveness and reconciliation that characterized that era.
When the first black rector of the conservative University of the Free State announced on taking office last year that he was readmitting a group of four white students who were suspended for abusing black workers, he was roundly condemned. The students had filmed themselves appearing to urinate in the workers' food and then forcing them to eat it.
Twenty years ago, Professor Jonathan Jansen's hand of forgiveness, however hasty, would probably have received a grudging thumbs-up from black South Africans.
Instead, such was the uproar that Jansen was forced to launch intensive consultations on the return of the students that are still ongoing four months later.
'In some corners of our country, the shadows of pre-February 2 South Africa loom large,' the editor of the mass-circulation Sunday Times newspaper, Mondli Makhanya, wrote in an editorial recently, in which he deplored what he described as a slide in race relations.
'Let's revive the magnificent future we dreamed of on February 2, (1990, the date on which Mandela's release was announced).'
Some feel this hankering after the glory days of the 1990s is actually obstructing the emergence of new ideas to tackle problems, including rising corruption, populism and infighting in government.
'We have to walk out of the prison of past success,' Njabulo Ndebele, a novelist and academic, wrote in an editorial in the Sunday Times at the weekend.
'It is good to celebrate past success but fatal to seek to replicate it under altered circumstances.'
For Frans Cronje, deputy chief executive of the South African Institute of Race Relations, the key to the empowerment of black South Africans lies in weaning themselves off the promises of the paternalistic ANC.
As an example of the unrealistic expectations created by the ruling party, President Jacob Zuma in May promised to create 500,000 jobs during 2009. By year's end, against the backdrop of the global recession, the South African economy was estimated to have shed twice that number.
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