In purely statistical terms, the transformation in South Africa since the ending of apartheid has been impressive, Dr Kader Asmal said last night.
Dr Asmal, who is now the South African Minister for Water Affairs & Forestry, said that since 1994 an average of 1,000 new people each day had gained access to clean water and 1,000 premises had been connected to electricity. Two new health clinics catering for an average of 20,000 people had been opened weekly, while every two-and-a-half days construction began on 1,000 houses.
"The backlogs remain vast in these areas, of course, and the educational sector continues to be wracked by serious conflict which involves tensions between national and provincial authorities and between teachers and their employers," he added.
"Attempts to redress the imbalances of the past have often run up against recalcitrant public servants, as well as the vested interests of those who must sacrifice some of the luxury to which they have been accustomed under a system in the past of effective sheltered employment for whites, in order that a more equitable distribution of resources may prevail."
Dr Asmal, who lived in Ireland for several years and led the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement, was delivering the 1998 Oliver Tambo memorial lecture in Dublin.
In the new South Africa, he said, health, education and housing were minefields when it came to the redistribution of services, but government was under an insistent moral and constitutional obligation to pursue transformation as urgently as possible. "Transformation is not an optional extra. It is not negotiable. It must happen."
One of the most visible and extraordinary signs of the serious pursuit of a complete transition, he said, was to be seen in the many symbolic gestures of the new government and leaders outside government. "Prime actors in this respect have been President Mandela and Archbishop Tutu, although their magnanimity has been replicated time without number at all levels of social life in South Africa, particularly in the first two years after the elections."
Inevitably, however, said Dr Asmal, the reality of a relatively unchanged daily life had returned to try most South Africans while plans for transformation became more threatening to a minority who somehow expected to enjoy the fruits of liberation without changing their lifestyle and outlook.
"Nowhere has this been more vividly and distressingly evident than in the attempts by organised rugby, with a truculent and financially powerful conservative at the helm until recently, to evade its developmental responsibilities while pursuing ever greater profits and power under the cloak of the `privacy' of its endeavours."
Yet perhaps the undoubted decline in the importance of symbolism and the showing of certain interest groups' true colours signified the achievement of a degree of normality, said Dr Asmal.
