After the party, again: A course in sobriety from Holden and van Vuuren, after the euphoria of Mangaung

On the morning after, the hangover and bleak thoughts.

True, the ANC centenary is a fine achievement: - from the abject, serflike status of the passlaw-bound masses of one century ago, to a society today with its political destiny in its own hands.

Jawellnofine. Well-and-good.

But, what about the day after tomorrow? That is, the next decade, let alone the next centenary? What is to be done with this fine acquisition of political freedom and independence, the key-in-the door to maturity, now in the hands of the young adult standing on the threshhold of decision-making? What is to be done?, as Lenin once asked, rather more than a century ago.

The omens are not good. Lenin wrote at another time about an "infantile disorder". South Africa's "infantile disorder", as it takes the young adult's step into the real world of increasingly competitive globalised economy, is that it appears to have chosen to comfort itself with the child's soothing medicine of "economic justice".

There is no "economic justice" in world economy.

This is a complete misreading of Marx, that great placebo and comfort medicine of the newly self-enfranchised South Africa. Marx's entire theory was buiilt upon a powerful notion of production, with its central motor force posited on human labour, working on the gifts of nature.

Whereas the dogma of "economic justice" posits itself on a fantasy of entitlement, that is, of consumption.

The harsh reality for any society is: - no production, no consumption.

It is an infantile disorder to imagine that by adding the letter S to the initials BRIC, South Africa really now is in the same league as Brazil (with its immense natural resources in the hands of an enterprising,  market-oriented, technically-educated, home-grown economic leadership), or Russia (with its debilitated economy feeding off the blessing of reserves of natural gas and oil), or India (read as Brazil, above), or China (the same).

The disgraceful figures for maths passes in last year's matric exams, released only days before the self-congratulatory euphoria at Bloemfontein/Mangaung, tell the real story, and predict the real future of the country with far greater precision than dreams of "economic justice".

What these figures ask, with the clarity of mathematics, is that if this pattern were to continue, where exactly will South Africa's home-grown engineers, and information technology wizards, and physcists, and chemists, and economic leaders, and skilled workers come from, who can equip the society in adult fashion to compete with the real BRIC nations, let alone the mature economic powers of the white, bourgeois West?

Grow up!

Deal with the real world!

Stop expecting hand-outs, and get on with the job of becoming really equal - instead of stifling the society with a culture of dependency, like a stroppy teenager, full of resentment and blame. Grow up!

Here, a terrible warning about how the bad habits of the present grew out of the bad habits of the past can be found in a new, important book published towards the end of last year, The Devil in the Detail: How the Arms Deal Changed Everything, by Paul Holden and Hennie van Vuuren (Jonathan Ball, 2011).

In remorseless detail, it provides a comprehensive and integrated picture of how the social revenue of the society derived from taxation came to be used - not for production, which would in the real world generate more revenue, but for consumption, under a grasping ideology of self-entitlement. Self-entitlement for the ruling political party, funding itself from the social revenue of the country, self-entitlement for its acolytes, its fixers and its hangers-on, leading to a culture of corruption, decay and decline.

The euphoria of Mangaung, or the sobriety of this thorough analysis of the arms deal. It's a choice.

In telling detail, the book explains how the culture of rapacity of the arms deal of the Nineties grew out of a strange

Pact between the SADF and leading commanders of Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) in exile in the Eighties, in the criminal traffic into South Africa of drugs, gems and ivory, and the criminal traffic out of the country in stolen cars.

Greatly more research and truth-telling is needed to uncover the full extent of this bad heritage, which set the course for the bad present. Who did what? Who are the real godfathers of South Africa's present decline? And how can this culture of criminality in public life be brought to a close?

This book presents a balance sheet for South Africa. It's a house-keeping audit for the ANC centenary: a course of cold turkey, after the drug binge.

But who wants a harsh truth?

Time will tell.

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