“Honourable members,

Distinguished guests,

We are a nation at work.”

—President Jacob Zuma, SONA 2014

Do you ever feel like this country is drifting? I don’t mean “off course”, which would suggest that there was some broader consensus on where South Africa is meant to go. I’m referring to the creeping, pervasive sense that there is nothing mooring us to anything—that South Africa is not properly African, that the country has no real place in the wider world. The events of the day chug away from us like a toy steam train—our values at home, based on principles defined (however loosely) at the dawn of democracy, waft away with the fake steam. This is a country in which the State of the Nation does not represent the state of the nation. We are dissolute, fragmentary, coming apart at the seams.

South Africa is disappearing.

The president, it seems, is starting to panic. Or he is pretending to. His latest SONA was meant to represent an economic call to arms. In the previous financial quarter, the economy contracted for the first time since 2009. In lieu of this, the same credit rating agencies that accorded sterling AAA ratings to mortgage-backed derivatives created by sociopathic hacks at the world’s big financial institutions—the very same garbage products that nearly destroyed the global economy—have now downgraded South Africa to roughly junk status. In other words, the institutions that collaborated in bankrupting the planet have now pronounced on Mzansi, and they have found her wanting. Fitch and Standard & Poor’s shots across the bow could raise the cost of borrowing, putting further strain on our beleaguered coffers. Within the intricate swirl of the international economic corruption complex, the slow evaporation of the South African Dream is accorded a BBB-, and that is that.

Which is probably why President Zuma’s State of the Nation address focused so frantically on the numbers, trumpeting the government’s latest meaningless buzz-term: “radical socio-economic transformation”. The implementation of such a project would require, first and foremost, Jacob Zuma’s head on a pike, making it somewhat less than viable. Nonetheless, this is what the government is now selling. It’s worth wondering why that might be.

Just last year, Goldman Sachs released a report called “Two Decades of Freedom—A 20-year Review of South Africa”, a bullish document that reminded the company’s clients just how far the country had come since ditching Apartheid. It roughly trucks with the ANC’s Good Story to Tell sales pitch, in that both projects are premised on comparing present day South Africa with one of the more morally and financially bankrupt regimes in human history, according us a gold star by comparison. And while the Goldman Sachs report is written by crooks for fools, analysed carefully, even this advertorial brochure can’t mask the following: coinciding with Polokwane in December 2007, the wheels started coming off.

Post 2007, the changes brought about by the ANC’s Polokwane conference and the onset of the global financial crisis had the effect of moderating […] growth, which resulted in a more subdued but still positive average GDP growth rate of 2.2%, and average inflation of 6.6% in the period 2007 to 2013.

What this really means is that, after a thirteen-year breather, South Africa’s manifold dysfunctions started to be reflected in the economy, and by the economics of unfairness that have defined us since the first boat disgorged the first company men at the Cape of Good Hope four centuries ago. The reason the economy contracted in the previous quarter isn’t hard to parse: 70,000 platinum workers have been off the job for five months, the first in what is certain to be wave after wave of labour strife.

The labour movement in this country has unravelled. Cosatu has become an ANC shill; Joseph Mathunjwa, who heads up the competing Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union, lives like a hip-hop mogul. The government can’t weigh in on the side of workers, because among them are the new mining czars, the neo-Oppenheimers (or, more properly, their well-paid lackeys). Grock this: the billionaire Big Man in bed with Lonmin plc, who emailed encouragement to the mining ministry to treat striking miners like criminals (thus helping create the atmosphere of violence in which 34 men were shot down in Marikana on 16 August 2012) is now the Deputy President of the country.

But don’t be fooled: Cyril Ramaphosa doesn’t have any real power. Like most of his colleagues in Cabinet, his job is to service the corporate interests that underpin this country, which has never been a country so much as a place to plunder. Comic-tragically, SONA indicated that Ramaphosa will be the government’s point man on addressing wage equality: “[he] will convene the social partners dialogue, within the ambit of the National Economic Development and Labour Council,” insisted the president.

But in the long run, none of this really means anything, because the notion of work in South Africa changes by the day. As we disgorge legions of semi-literate graduates from high schools, colleges and universities—all of this while blowing enormous sums on education—they enter the real world and find that there is no real world. There is nothing for them to do. The band of wealth in this country is so narrow that servicing those with cash is the best outcome most young South Africans can hope for. The manufacturing sector has all but disappeared. There is little innovation, scant interest in R&D, and the government insists on making entrepreneurship an exercise in frustration. Money evaporates, and condenses on the windows of Mercedes dealerships and in high security luxury estates that ape Tuscany. In the grey zone of the informal economy, life is a battlefield. Modern South Africa, which was conceived as a beacon to humanity, has become a place of almost unimaginable harshness.

Have good things happened? Sure. Almost 45 million are now officially people. Opportunities were accorded to those who would otherwise never have had them. The South African narrative is fathomlessly rich, and those who plumb it for stories—literary, cinematic, musical or otherwise—count themselves among the best artists in the world. But we are not in control. We are subject to the whims of the creeps and the cowboys, the scumbag analysts and their BBB ratings. What’s more, most of this is self-inflicted.

And if the wounds are self-inflicted, then the solutions lie within. SONA notwithstanding, Jacob Zuma cannot lead, because he doesn’t know how. What’s more, leading isn’t his job—he is Distributor in Chief, spreading patronage where it needs to go so that the ANC can keep its hold on power. There is no one in the wings waiting to save South Africa. South Africa will have to save South Africa.

That, sadly, is the real State of the Nation. The country is drifting; there is no one at the helm. The shale of shore is looming, and its closer than we think. Radical socio-economic transformation will certainly happen. Just not the way the government expects it to. DM