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NOW that the election campaign has begun in earnest, one can identify the concerns confronting the electorate this year a bit more clearly. There is a growing consensus that the tensions in our society can be resolved with a strategy that can deliver inclusive, rapid economic growth and that is at once developmental and enhances social justice.

Service delivery protests have already marked out the backlog in housing and supportive services as a key concern among the poor. Though housing devolves on all three tiers of government, local government, being closest to citizens, invariably is blamed for failure. Urban legends about the corrupt distribution of this scarce resource inspire often violent demonstrations.

There is a fourth player that is hardly mentioned in relation to housing: the banks and the building societies. Since the death of Joe Slovo, the banks have been reluctant partners in addressing the problem. The informal settlements around all our urban areas have grown exponentially since 1994, thanks to a rate of urban migration that outstrips the state’s capacity to deliver adequate housing.

Though protesters, the opposition parties and the media focus on the government, it is but one of many centres of power.

We have just emerged from a very successful voter registration drive. The Independent Electoral Commission reports a particularly impressive response from young voters and anticipates an 80% turnout based on registrations. Such high levels of voter participation indicate an active citizenry. South Africa’s democracy is still under construction but its foundations are sound. The national debate should be about the edifice we are constructing on that foundation.

One of the most visible results of democracy has been the rapid growth of the African middle and upper strata. The consequences are that the broad national coalitions, comprising various class forces that the liberation movements mobilised during the struggle for freedom, have become less tenable. Perhaps this is among the factors that stimulated the tension between the African National Congress (ANC) and the largest Congress of South African Trade Unions affiliate, and the subsequent problems within the union federation itself. Greater fluidity among and within established alliances will enrich national political discourse during these elections and should be welcomed.

The arrival of democracy has created the opportunity to make race irrelevant to South Africa’s politics. Its continuing salience reflects the persistence of the outcomes produced by centuries of racial domination. The pursuance of social justice in South Africa necessarily entails the redress of racially determined disadvantage. Only the wilfully blind could construe recognition of that reality as illiberal.

Stripped of the humbug and the clever terms they use, the thrust of such arguments is that we should live with the outcomes produced by colonial domination and apartheid. Lacking the courage to admit that their prescriptions will preserve the inequalities of colonialism and apartheid into the future, they find it easier to accuse the ANC of "racial politics". Laws to facilitate restitution are internationally recognised as an efficacious means of addressing past systematic discrimination and exclusion. Our constitution explicitly enjoins it.

The pre-1994 statute books abound with laws, ordinances and regulations passed by governments in which not a single African (with the possible exception of the Cape Province before 1963) had a voice. Virtually all the white political parties were committed to those arrangements before 1990. Yet there are those who hold the ANC responsible for South Africa’s racialised politics! From the very first petitions it addressed to both the Pretoria and Westminster governments, the ANC warned that the 1909 Act of Union had fatally racialised our politics.

White domination was a system serving particular vested interests. The racially skewed access to all economic assets; the domination of the professions and executive positions in business by white males; the poverty of the African majority and their lack of life skills — all were intended outcomes. The economic status and power whites still enjoy are not the result of greater diligence. It is the effect of undisguised racist policies.

Some would prefer historical amnesia, if not the active suppression of that historical record. As a nation, we can ill afford the perpetuation of the destructive consequences of racial oppression. The attitude of benign neglect counselled by a handful of thinkers on the right will entrench rather than erode the racialised stratification of our society. It should come as no surprise that such policy options find little traction among South Africa’s voters. State intervention to accelerate social reform has won the support of millions of voters, as the previous four elections show.

This year’s elections will very likely determine the course South Africa pursues for the next 10 years or more. They will be conducted on a political landscape made far more complex by the outcomes produced by democracy. Among these, the social mobility attained, especially by the African majority, is probably the most significant.

• Jordan is a former arts and culture minister.