South Africans are sighing in relief at the end to a decade that is best described as a period in which we shamed ourselves as a constitutional democracy.
History will forever remind us that under the Zuma presidency we allowed a group of people to behave like bullies that broke every rule the system imposed on them, terrorised every institution that tried to rein them in and stole everyone’s lunch money, no matter how vulnerable they were.
During this decade, all the major indices moved in the wrong direction. Confidence in our economy saw us limping between negative and junk status.
Our unemployment figures are the highest they have ever been and with economic contraction we will be faced with burgeoning poverty and increasing labour-related protests.
You can add to this political foolishness fuelled by incompetently led SOEs, the culture of state looting and exploitative coalition politics.
Rising xenophobia, which included the brutal murder of foreign nationals, filled us with horror.
Let us also not forget the national shame that we all felt at the saga of a president accused of rape and the tragic death in 2016 of Fezekile Ntsukela Kuzwayo, known to us all as Khwezi.
It was as if our national broken heart could take no more. Then the state capture bomb burst and we limped from one denial to another by political leaders until we almost believed the lies we were fed.
When in 2017 the main opposition party began to tell us about the benefits of colonialism during a time of great pain in this country, we descended into race-hate politics that was entirely predictable.
Rabid racists emerged all over the Twittersphere and the summary of it all was a narrative that did incalculable damage to white South Africans, who were increasingly being portrayed as a group infested with racist beliefs who were set on defending entrenched privilege.
The burning flame of hope, which our yearning for democracy inspired within us as we stood in long voting lines in 1994, was snuffed out like a lone candle in a miner’s house.
With load-shedding arriving as the final nail in the coffin, we all knew that the horrible reality of a failed state was inching closer and closer to the South African doorstep.
When Cyril Ramaphosa became president towards the end of the decade and inspired the country with his “Tuma Mina” speech, we felt the stirrings of a roused nation once again. We woke to our brilliance and our power as a nation. And then we fell flat on our faces as quarter after quarter we faced negative growth coupled with revelations of silence and complicity by our leaders in state capture.
We are a better people than this. In 1994, we found within us the power to overcome bitterness and brutality and showed the world a bravery that founded a brilliant democracy, despite our demons.
Let us not allow the last decade to define us. Let us dispense with the political point-scoring and insults. It is destructive to our orientation towards constitutionalism.
Let us take the power that caused us to stand side by side in voting lines in 1994 to now weave the fabric that is needed to clothe and heal our wounded democracy.
It is time to change the story.
* Lorenzo A Davids is chief executive of the Community Chest.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
Cape Argus