By Ivor Chipkin, Gumani Tshimomola, Ryan Brunette –
The problem facing government departments is not simply an issue of poor leadership or unskilled officials; it is structural.
News reports of the truly diabolical conditions in public hospitals in the Free State (such as those in the Mail & Guardian of July 4) fuel what is becoming an increasingly common refrain: South Africa is a failed state or is tending towards failure. Analyst Moeletsi Mbeki opened this account, and many others have drawn on it. Alex Boraine’s recent book, What’s Gone Wrong? On the Brink of a Failed State, has a double sense of disappointment and a premonition of disaster.
We think we should be cautious of such analyses, however. Writer Jonny Steinberg notes that people have been warning of impending disaster since the union of 1910. We once asked what makes us South Africans; Steinberg might say that it is a propensity to think in catastrophic terms.
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