The Tintswalo analogy that has Ramaphosa cornered as South Africa turns 30

Tintswalo is a girl, well, a woman of the ‘Rainbow Nation.’ Born in 1994, she celebrates her birthday in the same months the dangerous race-based system of apartheid was finally defeated.

About to turn 30 this year, Tintswalo grew up in a mass housing scheme built for shack-dwellers, received state-funded education and health care, graduated into a well-paying job, and is now living happily in a plush home with a bright future.

This is a tale told by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. And according to him, Tintswalo, whose name means ‘mercy’, is an allegorical figure representing the gains of the ‘new South Africa’.

Her current good life and promising future are due to the African National Congress (ANC), which has governed since 1994. There is a looming election for the seventh democratic administration since the end of apartheid.

Yet President Ramaphosa’s expansive foray into mythology, to illustrate the supposed state of the nation and how far South Africa has come, would have drawn heat from the opposition on a range of grounds.

The national and provincial elections will be on from late April, with the actual date to be declared soon. And Ramaphosa’s conjuring of Tintswalo to illustrate how far South Africa and its citizens have come in three decades of ANC rule has meant that Tintswalo has suddenly become a major allegorical figure on the South African political landscape.

South Africa isn’t the first to name an identifier for ordinary people. In Kenya, they use Wanjiku to illustrate the ordinary folk. These allegorical figures are mostly women.

Local polls have projected the ANC to fall below the 50 per cent support. And Ramaphosa’s creation of Tintswalo’s ostensibly inspiring journey was enough to set the ANC’s political opposition on metaphorical fire.

Ramaphosa spoke at the State of the Nation Address (SONA) on February 8, 2024. It was later followed by days of furious retorts from a range of opponents in Parliament, one after another pointing to obvious flaws in Ramaphosa’s grand dream of life in South Africa under the ANC.

Summing up what many had to say, Herman Mashaba, former Democratic Alliance (DA) politico, now leader of break-away party ActionSA, said: “The story of Tintswalo, a resident of the ‘Ramaverse’ (Ramaphosa’s personal universe), is not the lived experience of an average South African. It is the exception.”

DA leader John Steenhuisen was harsher yet, citing “the arrogance of a president who is completely out of touch with ordinary South Africans”.

“None of the promises made by President Cyril Ramaphosa in his five SONA speeches has ever been kept,” said the official opposition DA, which is leading a loose coalition of parties hoping to oust the ANC from power.

There was criticism for SA’s limping economy, poor governance, decaying infrastructure, and world-record unemployment of over 41 percent, rising to 67 percent for job-seekers aged 25 or younger.

Also cited by critics were persistently high levels of crime, especially involving violence, with the Rainbow Nation now ‘boasting’ a murder rate of 75 per day in 2023 – or 45 per 100,000 people, according to police figures, and exceeding unnatural death rates of some countries involved in full-scale wars.

In Ramaphosa’s story, Tintswalo and her impoverished family were recipients of the ANC’s pre-liberation promise of ‘houses for all’, granted a small brick-and-mortar home, one of millions built through 1990s and sporadically since to better accommodate over 20 million citizens once living in tin and plastic shacks on urban fringes.

30 years on, there are vast settlements of quick-built, low-cost, low-income housing where once only shacks were to be seen, with many millions of citizens living in the roughly five million such homes built with state funds since 1994 – though many new shantytown settlements have also blossomed since.

Countering Ramaphosa’s rosy picture, a significant number of these homes for the poor were also poorly built, often with corruption at play, such that they are literally falling apart, forcing their hapless occupants to live in crumbling and cracking box-like mini-houses.

Likewise, although electrification has gone from being mainly available to elites, their businesses and government, to tens of millions of ordinary citizens in remote places – at the same time, South Africa has devolved from Africa’s leading producer of electrical power to enduring repeat bouts of outages.

The latest power cuts have returned the worst experience yet, crippling an already weak economy which the World Bank predicts will grow by only 1.3 percent this year.

“Our policies and programmes have, over the course of 30 years lifted millions of people out of dire poverty,” said Ramaphosa.

“Today, fewer South Africans go hungry and fewer live in poverty,” he added, citing World Bank statistics that SA’s poverty rate had fallen from 71 per cent in 1993 to 55.5 per cent by 2020.

Not only had SA handled Covid-19 well, and played a leading role in getting affordable and effective vaccines to Africans as a whole, said ANC leader Ramaphosa, but the country’s economy had recovered to pre-pandemic levels.

Nevertheless, South Africa is still the most unequal country by average income in the world, said his critics, and tens of millions continue to live in jobless grinding poverty.

Ramaphosa pushed aside the pressing issue of ongoing power outages that plague homes and businesses that have been unable to provide themselves with expensive alternative standby systems.

Outages over recent weeks having slightly diminished load-shedding would soon be a thing of the past, Ramaphosa claimed.

In response this week there were howls of derision and refutation – extended outages having returned the day after Tintswalo’s ‘appearance’ in the national consciousness, with almost-new power production units going down, mainly due to poor maintenance and corruption in construction, even as Ramaphosa was speaking.

Among Tintswalo’s many ‘liberation rewards’, said Ramaphosa, were free healthcare for pregnant women and young children, school nutrition schemes, tertiary education financing and a good job due to employment equity and black economic empowerment policies.

Opponents pointed out that the ANC’s efforts to promote the previously disadvantaged in the workplace, Tintswalo being put up as a supposed beneficiary, were also responsible for a loss of skilled workforce in key sectors, falling standards across the board and poor governance at all levels.

For every point Ramaphosa made, his critics made strong counter-points.

Without the disruptions of previous SONA speeches by the unruly Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), Ramaphosa’s speech itself suffered some heckling but no incidents, unlike last year when EFF MPs stormed the podium, having since been punished with a month’s suspension.

But it was not a ‘friendly’ occasion, dissension loudly in the air with each opposition MP to speak in response to Ramaphosa’s dream-like reality of life in South Africa.

In short, SA’s 2024 election season has fully kicked off with the DA hoping to take advantage of the ANC’s increasing unpopularity to move up from its prior showing in the low 20 per cent range.

The EFF is hunting a take-over of the role of official opposition from the DA – or even, perhaps, to form a coalition in governance with the ANC, something which fiery EFF leader Julius Malema previously told the Nation would “never happen”.

With some 26 million citizens – 42 per cent – receiving government grants, and other social security and human rights-oriented programmes working to some degree, it is undoubtedly true that most South Africans are better off today than in 1994.

But it is also so that South Africa’s once glorious future has become, in just three decades, like a morning mist, long since burnt away by the harsh reality of the fierce African sun.