by Mphuthumi Ntabeni

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QUEENSTOWN, SOUTH AFRICA - The most striking thing about South Africa is how far apart its three worlds are, though geographically they're in the same country. There are the suburban areas that have achieved first-world living standards, the remote and almost forgotten rural areas and the townships where the country's most frustrated stay marginalized by lack of skills and the purposelessness of their days. The living conditions in the last two parts of this country - rural and township - are appalling by any national standard.

If you want the best place to read the mood and spirit of the country go to the townships. Despite lavatory-wall gossip and contrived coffee-table opinions, inherited largely from romantic literature, life for the majority here is ghastly with a dulcet of unconscious disorder. All things being equal, this affords township life with an existential depth and melancholy charm absent from the more affluent suburbs.

The challenges of development for the present government are not easy. How, in this technological era, do you develop people the majority of whom are unskilled and semi-educated? The African National Congress (ANC), the ruling party, has come up with program after program to tackle the issue. So far all have failed in the implementation stage. The current one on its schedule is called the New Plan For African Development (NEPAD). It has involved most leaders of Southern Africa in its planning but it is rooted in the black educated class's growing cheerleading for the specious "African Golden Age, when Africa was self-sufficient. It has nationalistic features of past European humanistic theories, like Russian nihilism. It is compassionate, self-sacrificing and demands the subjugation of personality to party protocol. It is not yet in contact with the mindset of ordinary people. It is still just a sounding board for the ideas of the black "intellectual avant-garde" under the tutelage of our current president, Thabo Mbeki.

Most ordinary people are wary of it.

They see in it only as one of Mbeki's enigmatic complexities coupled with flirting with Western economic policies that are bound to lose them jobs.

A more generous analysis, though, might discover that it is an attempt at African development through principles of free-trade economics, collective and humanistic in tenor, similar to Marxism before Leninist and Stalinist perversions. In that view, NEPAD incorporates the splendors of the West's " tolerance and diversity " in a sense that promotes laissez-faire economics as long as markets do not cripple collective development. This attitude is laudable since it is incumbent upon the countries of Africa (especially South Africa which has just emerged from a prolonged period of apartheid rule founded, chiefly, on colonial oppression) to search for an authentic order of development based on our own history, traditions and capacities.

In my view, the problem is that in South Africa, as in most democratic countries of our era, there is a growing disillusionment among ordinary people with the tendency of Western forms of democracy to abandon the very values that gave them strength. Modern democracies now seem run from behind the scenes; their politics distort the national will and promote things like capital elitism by serving the vested interests of the rich.

In South Africa, this flaw is exacerbated by an electoral system that promotes political party clubs but denies the electorate powers to elect their president independently and directly. In the South African system, the president is elected by the national executive of the party that wins the elections. Though electing your president [on the part of the victorious political party] benefits the smooth talkers, it does not necessarily elect the best man for the position. Most South Africans feel they should be allowed to live with their own mistakes. To some extent this may explain the majority's reserve towards President Mbeki, whom they feel was imposed upon them.

Many see him as in too much of a hurry to make the country a modern state (an understandable reserve from people whose major capital is human labor). The worst fear of these ordinary folks is ending up like India - with a world-class economy and a majority of chronically poor citizens.

They also do not see why they should be asked to support a system whose prosperity seems to benefit merely bankers, speculators and the rest of the people granted the fortune of farming profits from inherited capital. In short they don't see why they should work their butts off only to increase other people's money.

The average toward resident distrusts the very system that everyday seems to consolidate and develop greed more than human development.

But, emotions aside, what is the alternative?

There is a price for freedom and democracy. Ours is to try and ward the weeds not to poison the feed. To change the predatory tendencies of capitalism, the production system in the world, towards a more humanistic face. A positive contribution towards Africa's development, which many feel has had a raw deal when the foundations of prosperity through capitalism were founded, would be a good way to start.

Transnational corporations, for instance, should start participating in the development of a developing world, not through international aid operations, but as business enterprises that avoid klepto-capitalism.

It is time they engage in consortia with developing governments to provide managerial skills and capital for the viable programs of these governments, in return for profits derived from growth-oriented exports, for instance. Programs like NEPAD offer them that opportunity - even if the concept itself still needs some fine-tuning. . As Colin Allan (the director of Public Service Accountability (PASAM) in South Africa put it in his address to the British Foreign Office: the value of NEPAD will be realized when it "is transformed from being a partnership between African leaders and industrial states into a social contract between African governments and their own people."

He goes further in proposing means by which this can be achieved. No Western government who wants to contribute to NEPAD can afford not to read his address - especially if it wants to avoid the failures of organizations like those funded by the IMF and World Bank in Africa.

The first challenge is in [repairing the African people's civic conscience that was destroyed by colonialism. The mood in Africa is ideal for this. The younger generation, especially, is hungry for a culture and education that will give them a proper purpose in their lives without stealing their identity.

It use to be that the world looked to the US for ideas of freedom. But seemingly now the US is doing its best under G. W. Bush to depredate the elementary principles of freedom it use to promote. In fighting terrorism it is putting on the face of terrorists. Besides that, most of us loved its political and social system that appeared to wish to govern people by pure legal articulationm and respect differences between men. But today we are looking to ourselves for ways to make the principles of liberty liquidate poverty in our world.

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MPHUTHUMI NTABENI attended the school of Architecture in the University of Witswatersrand after High School, though he's not certain now what he was doing there. A misunderstanding occurred somewhere as he was looking for an education and all they could do was to train him. After that he left in a despairing mood for the city of Port Elizabeth where he re-invented himself. When he suspected there was nothing more to learn from the honking gulls of the sea, and he had paid off the government loan for his studies, he went back to his home, Queenstown. He now lives there under the nurturing care of his mother (no one else will have him) trying to make sense of the society he grew up in and exorcise the demons of growing under the apartheid regime. He's also waiting to grow up ad dreaming of being a member of that wretched tribe that earns its living by composing thoughts into words. This is his second article for The World's Magazine.