In October 2015, the Gupta brothers offered Mcebisi Jonas the position of minister of finance in exchange for R600-million. Then deputy minister of finance, Jonas turned down the bribe and a period of deep introspection followed for him.

How did we reach this point, and what did the future hold for South Africa’s democracy and the economy?

In After Dawn, Mcebisi Jonas analyses the crisis at the heart of our current system, which places politics at the centre of policy-making and implementation at the expense of growth.

In this important and authoritative book, Jonas first unpacks and analyses the current badlands of the South African economic and political landscape. In the second half, Jonas proposes a series of workable and practical solutions for transitioning South Africa into a growing, job-creating country including:

• Putting inclusive growth at the centre of economic policy;
• rapidly expanding new technological capacities and knowledge to transition to a twenty-first-century economy;
• expanding human capabilities at scale;
• path-changing trade-offs to catalyse the next phase of South Africa’s development;
• nurturing a corruption-free, high-performance state built on meritocracy and innovation; and
• changing the nature of politics.

Time is of the essence and the window of opportunity is narrowing for all South Africans to work together towards the South Africa we all imagined was possible in 1994.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mcebisi Jonas is the former deputy finance minister of South Africa, a position he held from 2014 until 2016, in addition to being a member of the National Assembly of South Africa. Jonas was born in Uitenhage in the Eastern Cape. He has been politically active since the age of 14. After returning to South Africa from exile in the 1990s, Jonas served in the Eastern Cape government before being appointed to the National Treasury.

After Dawn: Hope After State Capture is published by Pan Macmillan South Africa