"just another country" - have haunted me for close on 20 years. Let me explain why.

With many others, I was caught up in the enthusiasm and excitement of apartheid's unravelling.

In various ways, each sought to make a contribution to what we thought (and hoped) this country could become - something different.

This is why much of what was thought and written at the time was idealistic. This was not a bad thing. After all, we were building a society that was everything apartheid wasn't.

SA was to be (in the language of the times) a nonracial, nonsexist democracy. In other words, it was to be a country far removed from the misery that apartheid had delivered to all the country's people.

But as the lights of those high- minded times started to flicker, I read the three words in a prediction which was - gleefully, I believe - made by a British-based expatriate.

SA, he confidently wrote, will become "just another country".

In ways too complex to explain - but which are very simple to say - this has come to pass.

It is to be seen in our political discourse, which has descended from the ringing promise of the preamble to the constitution to the street theatre of African National Congress Youth League leader Julius Malema.

The "street" is a good image to use for this because Malema's politics and rhetoric are the same strain of "main street" popularism that carried George Bush to the White House and may still carry the Sarah Palin into the same residence.

The rougher manifestations of the same street politics are to be seen in the trashing by the strikers of the very places that they hold - or should hold - dear: the schools and hospitals where professionalism, not demolition, should hold sway.

What has happened?

There are, of course, as many explanations as there are South Africans. But, for me, the overriding one is that the country's hope has been surrendered to rapacious and unyielding self-interest.

The evidence for this is to be found not in the television debates by experts on economic growth and poverty, but in the knots of men on street corners hoping for work, and in the number of mothers begging for bread (or booze) at traffic lights. These South Africans have no real lives in the policy statistics so readily tendered by the reckless politician or the well-heeled investment banker as they explain the country's reality.

The complexity of translating all that hope into policy would always be difficult. Centuries of exclusion by race, by class and by gender would present enormous challenges at home. And this would be especially difficult when set against the unprecedented change that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In the rush to move on, get things done and to rejoin the world, we succumbed too quickly, I fear, to the promise that all our differences and difficulties could be dissolved by the simple idea that economics matters more than anything else.

Revealingly, our initial differences were resolved by lawyers, not economists. When Nelson Mandela set the transition in motion by signing the Groote Schuur Minute, guarantees under the law mattered the most.

Today, in contrast, scarcely a conversation in the country - political or other - doesn't have money at its very centre. As a result, our politics - and perhaps our very lives - are driven by what Jakes Gerwel once called the politics of envy.

We seem to know the price of everything and the value of nothing. This, of course, is Oscar Wilde's famous definition of a cynic.

This brings us back to the three words - "just another country". It was wishful to believe that this could be an exceptional country. Our brief moment of exception was Mandela's, when heroism and hope drew us together, and many things - no, everything - seemed possible.

Now, however, just like everywhere else in this post-global world, we stagger from crisis to crisis. We've become just another country.

Vale, Nelson Mandela Professor of Politics at Rhodes University, is currently a Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies.