We have now begun our descent Quotes

“The writing of the NDP is one of the most significant achievements of the Zuma administration. For decades he will be remembered for setting up this institution of great men and women, who gave us a clear, implacable plan for us to make our country great for our children and their children.14 If he does not show leadership and begin following its recommendations, though, it will also be known down the ages as the great plan that never saw the light of day. It is not the NDP’s fine words that our children’s children will want to admire. They will want lights, water, comfort and dignity. We have a chance to give it to them in just a decade. Let’s do it.”
― Justice Malala, We have now begun our descent: How to Stop South Africa losing its way

“The DA, however, was left with the toxic stink of the party of apartheid despite the fact that the NP had found its home in the warm bosom of the ANC. The DA has never been able to shake off this stink, hence the general perception that it was the party of privilege and of apartheid. Incredibly, survey respondents still express a fear that, if elected, the DA would ‘bring back apartheid’. Even the powerful memory of Helen Suzman – for years the lone voice of opposition in the apartheid parliament – cannot wipe this perception away.25 In the run-up to the 2014 election, the ANC was faced with a massive problem. Its president, Zuma, was discredited and was and remains by all accounts a liability.26 Its deployed cadres in government were mired in one scandal after another. Service delivery protests were spreading while Cosatu was imploding. Yet the party had its ‘shy voters’. It merely slipped from 65.9 per cent to 62 per cent of the vote. Given its problems and the bad press it received, the ANC fooled many among us. One London-based analyst had doggedly predicted that the ANC would fall to 55 per cent of the vote.27 He was wrong.”
― Justice Malala, We have now begun our descent: How to Stop South Africa losing its way

“Yet these vastly different forces have been in an unhealthy, even toxic, embrace since the start of the democratic era. Cosatu has stopped the ANC from implementing its economic policies, while the ANC has caved in to its allies’ sectarian whims. The youth wage subsidy that was crafted and put on the table by former Minister of Finance Pravin Gordhan was nearly stopped by Cosatu for partisan reasons.37 Implementation of the National Development Plan (NDP) is stalled because of Cosatu’s intransigence. Moves to stop teachers from striking and to up their performance are routinely throttled by Cosatu.38”
― Justice Malala, We have now begun our descent: How to Stop South Africa losing its way

“Will they win in 2019? It doesn’t matter. The key is that they need to do so well that the ruling party realises that if it does not up its game then it will be shouting from the opposition benches very soon. The bottom line is that we need competition in the system. We haven’t had enough of it in more than 21 years of democracy, and that has led to the lethargy, and disrespect of voters, that we constantly see in our country.”
― Justice Malala, We have now begun our descent: How to Stop South Africa losing its way

“Today confidence in our country – internally and externally – is waning. Since 2009 we have been losing the war against corruption, poverty and unemployment. Our economy is growing at appalling levels compared to the rest of the continent. We are no longer the darlings of the world. If the increase in what are called ‘service delivery protests’ is anything to go by, we are no longer the darlings of our own people either.10”
― Justice Malala, We have now begun our descent: How to Stop South Africa losing its way

“Chief among his advisors, and swiftly appointed to head up the South African Secret Service when Zuma came to power in 2009, was Mo Shaik, the ANC underground operative who became the democratic South Africa’s first chief of National Intelligence. He was disgraced when he tried to besmirch the NPA head, Bulelani Ngcuka, in 2003. In the two and a half years preceding Jacob Zuma’s ascent to power at Polokwane, Shaik built a formidable network of volunteers, funders and recruiters to back Zuma’s campaign.26”
― Justice Malala, We have now begun our descent: How to Stop South Africa losing its way

“It is a story that exposes South Africa’s structural weaknesses, too. We are one of the world’s two most unequal societies (with Brazil) and the poor are talking to the cosy elites and saying they can and they will rise up. Poverty, inequality and unemployment are at the heart of the shootings.”
― Justice Malala, We have now begun our descent: How to Stop South Africa losing its way

“The Marikana Massacre, as it has come to be known, was the deadliest single police action since apartheid police killed 69 people and injured 180 at Sharpeville in March 1960. As at Marikana, many of those killed at Sharpeville were shot in the back as they tried to run away from police fire. Eight of the dead were women and 10 were children. How did we get to such a low point in South Africa, in a free and democratic country in which the party of Nelson Mandela was in power? How did we get to a point where only one government leader, defence minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, has had the guts not only to go to the bereaved communities but also to apologise? What happened to us? The Marikana Massacre underlined everything that was wrong about the new South Africa. If there is in any way a nadir for our failures over the past 21 years of our democracy, this was it. Marikana exposed the myth of black economic empowerment (BEE) as a tool that does not actually empower workers and communities but creates a small, mollycoddled, arrogant, selfish black elite.”
― Justice Malala, We have now begun our descent: How to Stop South Africa losing its way

“on the freedom of the press, and the single-minded drive to control all media in South Africa, take place while many journalists keep quiet. I have commented a lot on the SABC saga, on government attempts to cow the media and on the Gupta scandals in my columns and through my television programme, The Justice Factor, on the news channel eNCA. To my shame I have kept quiet about what is happening at places like Independent Newspapers, where I began my career. I also kept quiet when the chief executive officer of e.tv, the media company that owns the channel that airs my show, came out in 2014 and alleged that there were numerous and serious attempts to control news content on the channel. His testimony was chilling.”
― Justice Malala, We have now begun our descent: How to Stop South Africa losing its way

“Here is what I believe is still the truth of our country, one that we do not acknowledge enough: do not underestimate the strides we have made. South Africa today is a very different country to the one we entered in 1994. It will be even better in 21 years’ time if we use these racist outpourings to build a better South Africa. But we need to take care, for we remain a tinderbox. If we do not quickly resolve the structural challenges facing South Africa – unemployment, inequality and poor educational outcomes – then these eruptions of race will take on a whole new hue. We will become a Zimbabwe, where the black poor will point at the prosperous whites, and act in a manner that will set light to the tinder. This is an urgent problem. Despite the progress made over the past two decades, South Africa remains a country of white haves and black have-nots. This is a problem we need to stare in the face if we are to begin to build this country. This is not a conversation to have in order to apportion blame. We are past that. It is a conversation to have in order for us to move faster to lift up the poorest of the poor, to bring hope into every home.”
― Justice Malala, We have now begun our descent: How to Stop South Africa losing its way

“If there is one thing that we should have fixed in the new South Africa it is education. After my matric I enrolled for an A-level course in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Within the first day of studies my South African friends and I knew, without a shadow of doubt, that the South African system had well-nigh destroyed us: the Zimbabweans were far more educated, more assured and more able to grasp the advanced concepts put before us by our teachers. We were left in the dust. Today, a tour of South Africa’s banks, pension funds, asset managers, insurance companies and other financial services firms will show you that it is Zimbabweans and other black Africans who are at the top of the pile. The reason for this is not difficult to find: Zimbabwe and other newly independent nations did not fiddle with their education systems. The system worked in colonial days and under post-liberation administrations. South Africa’s education system, however, was allowed to stutter, calcify and rot by our own post-1994 administrations, including that of Nelson Mandela.”
― Justice Malala, We have now begun our descent: How to Stop South Africa losing its way

“Respected academic Jonathan Jansen, the inspirational rector and vice chancellor of the University of the Free State, once said that not a single minister in our Cabinet takes their child to a public school.11 He is correct. Why? All those politicians know that most government schools in South Africa – except for a handful – are nothing short of dire.”
― Justice Malala, We have now begun our descent: How to Stop South Africa losing its way

“In many ways, this book is not about the politicians who are turning the ANC and Nelson Mandela’s legacy into a nightmare. It is about all of us, South Africans, who keep quiet when our voices are needed. It is about those of us who keep quiet when journalists like Mzilikazi wa Afrika are arrested on trumped-up charges.11 It is about those of us who have forgotten that freedom is never fully achieved, but is defended and renewed every single day, in every square inch of space we occupy in the world. If the South Africa of our dreams withers and dies, it will be because we have stepped away from the public square. Where is the real ANC? Crucially, where are the men and women who fought so valiantly for this new South Africa?”
― Justice Malala, We have now begun our descent: How to Stop South Africa losing its way

“The problem goes further than Zuma. Ordinary citizens will have to get out of the slump of dependency that so many of us have fallen into. Trade unions will have to stomach the idea that things have to change, and that the unemployed are as important as the employed. Principals and teachers will have to accept that supervision of schools will be stepped up. Business will have to accept that, without ethical leadership and participation in South Africa as a corporate citizen, the profit motive alone is just not good enough. It is bitter medicine, but it is medicine that we have to take. Reading the NDP document, it is clear that we could become a prosperous country within a relatively short period of time. But we need resolve at leadership level, we need non-partisanship, and we need to understand that this is the crossroads.”
― Justice Malala, We have now begun our descent: How to Stop South Africa losing its way

“South Africa needs some serious, ethical, authentic, values-driven and dynamic leadership – from government, business and civil society – over the next few years. Without such leadership we shall lose a golden opportunity to take this country towards the prosperity, peace and pride that it sorely needs.”
― Justice Malala, We have now begun our descent: How to Stop South Africa losing its way

“Failure, disaster and collapse can arrive very quickly. Sometimes it can take years of the drip-drip effect, of small things going wrong and being left unfixed. One day you look around and realise that everything is broken, that your country has been stolen. That is what I fear the Zuma presidency has been doing to South Africa since the man came to power in 2009.”
― Justice Malala, We have now begun our descent: How to Stop South Africa losing its way

“it is black people, my people, that you are betraying. It is black people who are unemployed, whose taxes you steal, whose lives you condemn to hopelessness and despair. It is black people who suffer when the institutions of state are rendered useless and cowed. It is black people – who the Zuma administration claims to be working for – who bear the brunt of the failure of the police, the courts, the state, to deliver on their mandates. These people didn’t fight and defeat apartheid for this. They didn’t fight and defeat apartheid to see their leaders feed at the trough while thousands go to bed hungry and cold.”
― Justice Malala, We have now begun our descent: How to Stop South Africa losing its way

“Unemployment is the single most dangerous issue facing South Africa today. It is creating a great mass of anger and frustration.”
― Justice Malala, We have now begun our descent: How to Stop South Africa losing its way

“Zuma’s genius, and the source of my admiration of the man, stems from the fact that he has not just grabbed at the idea of changing editors and media managers. Zuma’s genius is that he understands power, and that power means having control of the money. Think about it. At the SABC he has chosen the chairman of the board and the foot soldiers, such as the man who lied about his qualifications and yet has now become chief operating officer of the corporation. At Independent Newspapers, which will be the biggest beneficiary of the decision to support only pliant press with government advertising, he has Survé in his pocket. At the New Age and the television channel ANN7, his son lives with the proprietors. At eNCA his biggest allies control the business. Zuma outsmarted all of us in the press who fingered him for his many failings. He is in charge of our salaries, of the purse strings. Our bosses are jumping to his every bidding. So are the journalists. He has won.”
― Justice Malala, We have now begun our descent: How to Stop South Africa losing its way