Leadership Quote by Helen Suzman

Even in reassurance, Suzman refuses the narcotic of certainty. “I don’t think we will ever go the way of Zimbabwe” is a cautious hedge, not a promise, and the hedge is doing political work: it acknowledges fear without validating panic as destiny. Coming from Suzman - the liberal anti-apartheid parliamentarian who spent years as a near-solitary voice against state racism - the line carries the authority of someone who knows how quickly a country can normalize the unacceptable.

The Zimbabwe reference is loaded shorthand. In South African discourse of the late 1990s and 2000s, “Zimbabwe” often meant more than Mugabe’s authoritarianism; it was a code-word bundle for economic collapse, land seizures, racialized revenge, and the unraveling of institutions. Suzman’s phrasing tries to disarm that doomsday analogy while also taking seriously the anxieties animating it. The second clause - “but people are concerned” - shifts from prognosis to mood management. She’s naming a public sentiment that politicians ignore at their peril, and she’s implicitly warning that dismissing those concerns as mere prejudice can be as destabilizing as indulging them.

The sentence’s real target is complacency on two fronts: the complacency of elites who assume South Africa’s constitutional framework is self-sustaining, and the complacency of alarmists who treat neighboring catastrophe as inevitable fate. Suzman threads a narrow needle: respect the strength of institutions, keep your eyes open to how fragile they become when fear starts driving policy.