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John Kane-Berman is uniquely qualified to look back over the enormous political and social changes that have taken place in his lifetime in this fractious country. In his career as student leader, Rhodes Scholar, newspaperman, independent columnist, commentator, and Chief Executive, for thirty years, of the South Africa Institute of Race Relations, Kane-Berman has been at the coal face of political change in South Africa. The breadth and depth of ideas and events covered in Between Two Fires are striking: the disintegration of apartheid, the chaos of the 'people's war' and its contribution to the broader societal breakdown we see today, the liberal slideaway, the rise of an authoritarian ANC...
South Africa is awash with policy failures, and policy confusion. We argue firstly, that our current discord over policy details has its origin in the (celebrated) negotiated transition. We hold that the vote count of an 85% majority in the Constituent Assembly in 1996 obscured the reality that the Constitution meant different things to different negotiators. The result was that South Africa, from the very start of the democratic era, lacked a national consensus on how to go about consolidating democracy. We keep on failing to build a proper roof over our democracy because the constitutional foundations are weak.
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