Let me start with the big picture. In the nearly three decades since our transition to democracy, we have had one Non-Inflationary, Consistently Expansionary, or NICE, period sandwiched between two bad ones. We can see these phases most clearly in the growth of GDP per capita, which is the total amount of economic output divided by population.
This measure was negative during the dying years of apartheid, which means living standards were falling. It turned positive in 1994 and mostly stayed positive for two decades, apart from the crisis years of 1998 and 2009.