MARTINA BIENE: Freedom Day: a time for SA to consider how best to reach our dream deferred

Saturday, April 27, is a time for all of us who love SA so deeply to reflect. It’s 30 years since the country went to the polls for the first time as a nation after centuries of division, half a century of which was legislated oppression.

I wasn’t in the country then. My first trip was three years later, in 1997, as a young theological student on an outreach project in Cape Town, but SA made an abiding impression on me.

I remember the hope. If that candle had flickered in 1994 it was a bright, shining beacon when I arrived. The constitution was being passed in parliament, a marvellous document creating a road map of what this country could be.

The Truth & Reconciliation Commission was under way, there was a feeling of just what SA was going to achieve. This wasn’t about fixing the hurts of the past as much as it was about becoming the best country in the world.

Fast-forward 27 years and I am back in the country for a third time. This time it’s different. There’s a lot of despondency, some of it justified given the revelations of state capture that emerged from chief justice Raymond Zondo’s commission.

But amid the doom and the gloom of load-shedding, spiralling unemployment and an economy that seems to be deindustrialising, there is hope. I see it every day in Nelson Mandela Bay in the Eastern Cape, where I live.

Despite the dysfunctionality of the local political scene — I think we’ve had eight mayors in the last nine years — there are also green shoots that give me great hope. They come from the community, which gives me great comfort because it is where the company I work for has invested so much of its efforts since the first VW Beetle rolled off the production line in 1951.

I am proud of what my predecessors achieved; we were the first in the automotive industry to recognise black SA trade unions, and one of the first to appoint black executives. I am grateful for the sense of volunteerism that runs through our staff in Johannesburg and Kariega, giving up their time to contribute to the community.

There is so much more to do, and we will do it. I think South Africans don’t give themselves enough credit for what has been achieved. This is a remarkably cohesive country, despite what some of the politicians on the fringes might have us believe with their identify politics. There is a real culture of compassion and a real sense of empathy for different beliefs, languages, orientations and classes that you would be hard pressed to find overseas, even in Europe with its large diaspora communities.

We have smashed glass ceilings; we have women cabinet ministers; we have had a female deputy president. We have female combat commanders and fighter pilots. We have women CEOs and chairs of organisations as diverse as the JSE and, yes, Volkswagen SA.

It’s easy to start circling the drain on a steady diet of negativity in the news, corruption, crime and ugliness. It’s all too easy to keep telling those stories. The challenge for our media, which remains a window on our souls and our society — and one of the freest anywhere in the world — is to try to find the good stories to balance out the bad.

We need to keep the flickering light of that candle of hope from being blown out, because if you take a step back you realise the dream hasn’t been lost, it has just been delayed. This country is still as full of potential as it was when I first visited and fell in love with it in 1997, but like all long-term love affairs you realise you can’t go into this with your eyes closed and hope for the best.

We also can’t keep hoping for some magical person to swoop in and save us from our fate. We have to do it for ourselves. We have to be, as Gandhi said, the change we want to see. We have to start walking the talk, all of us. We have to stop paying lip-service to the very real problems that exist in this country — and that are getting worse. We have to get into action.

At Volkswagen, as we have since we first opened our doors in the then Uitenhage, it’s about more than just making cars, it’s more than giving people jobs; it is about the community, it’s about ubuntu. We are proud of changing the demographics of our company, of flying the SA flag by being the global sole manufacturer of the popular VW Polo from July this year.

We are proud of the work we have done to increase the number of black-owned businesses and suppliers in the automotive value chain. We are proud of investing more than R500,000,000 in corporate social investment projects over the last 30 years. We built a hospital during the Covid-19 pandemic, and we’re about to build our own primary school.

We are because of others, and all of us stand on the shoulders of those who went before us. We have all inherited the legacy Nelson Mandela bequeathed us — the question is what we are we going to do about it while we still have time.

I know what I’m going to do.

• Biene is chair and MD of Volkswagen Group Africa.