South Africa should seize the moment

South Africans go to the polls today to elect their president and lawmakers for the sixth time since the collapse of apartheid.

The 27 million voters have a chance to entrust leadership to a lot they can believe in to carry their hopes and aspirations and hopefully, fix the myriad sins of omission and commission attributable to the successive past governments.

For the vast majority black South Africans, the post-apartheid era has been a dream betrayed. Not surprisingly, an estimated 25 million eligible young people failed to register for the election.

That two of South Africa’s presidents — Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma — had to terminate their reigns prematurely speaks volumes about all that has gone wrong in the great Nelson Mandela’s “Rainbow Nation”.

However, it also gives hope that, unlike in the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, where presidents evolve into demigods whose tenures can only be ended midway through violence, its institutions in South Africa are functional and independent.

Whereas Mbeki quit after a recall by the ruling African National Congress (ANC) over alleged aloofness and indifference to the plight of the citizens, Zuma became the quintessential dean of the corrupt.

He is faulted for presiding over the state capture by corruption and is fighting a barrage of graft-related cases.

The past decade under the stewardship of Zuma was particularly eventful in the rainbow nation.

The country continued grappling with widespread unemployment, unconscionable wealth gap and feisty intercommunal and racial tensions and murderous xenophobic frenzies targeting sub-Saharan immigrants.

South Africa has since lost its position as Africa’s leading economy to Nigeria, though it remains the most sophisticated and modern.

But today, South Africans have a chance to make choices whose outcomes they will not regret.