Leading Article: And now for his next miracle

THE vote-counting continues in South Africa, but the outgoing president, FW de Klerk, has conceded defeat. Next Tuesday, his mantle will pass to Nelson Mandela, and South Africa's astonishing political metamorphosis will be complete. If the miracle is to continue, the transformation must soon begin to extend to the lives of those who have just voted for the first time.

It helps that Mr Mandela's African National Congress party has received an incontrovertibly clear mandate. The new government's cohesion is likely to benefit if the ANC's final tally remains below the 66 per cent that would notionally enable it to rewrite the interim constitution.

The task of achieving visible progress towards fulfilling expectations is by no means hopeless. The task is huge: 6 million people are unemployed, 9 million technically destitute, 10 million have no access to running water and 23 million no electricity. Millions have had little or no education.

Furthermore, the economy is relatively small: about the size of Maryland's, but with almost 10 times the American state's 4.5 million people. It is a high-wage, low- output economy heavily dependent on primary products. The public sector is bloated and inefficient. Having long been used to create jobs for whites, it will probably now be similarly abused for blacks.

On the plus side, the economy has moved out of recession over the past 12 months, outperforming expectations. The challenge to the new government will be to nurture this trend and redistribute some of the proceeds without shaking business confidence. The three key areas to be tackled are housing, education and health.

The prospects for rapid progress on housing and some land redistribution are fair to good. Billions of rand have been held in reserve for a massive building programme. The government will be in a position to free land acquired to consolidate the now defunct 'homelands', and the defence establishment also has a surplus. An end to subsidies for loss-making farms should release agricultural land.

Expenditure on health is already quite high at 6.9 per cent of gross domestic product. It must now be skewed towards the black majority rather than the white minority. The same goes for education, where the gap is even wider but there are expectations of substantial overseas development aid.

The haul will be long, and hopes of achieving lasting progress will depend on continued growth and the widening tax base resulting from greater economic activity and employment. Success on that front will hinge on business confidence, which will be vulnerable to a resumption of political violence.

The potential is there, notably in a tourist industry capable of huge and job-creating expansion. But it will require continued reconciliation and a high level of realism on all sides if Africa's first multiracial state is also to provide the continent's first human and economic success story.