Grow your own food to beat our failed and loopy social compact

To borrow a term from physics and squeeze it into law, there is something disturbingly loopy about the way the social compact manifests in SA — or doesn’t, as seems more likely if you follow the vector of state failure to its disastrous end. Loopy because circular. What has happened is that the elements without which society cannot thrive — security, health and education — are not adequately provided by the state. The but-for factor — the sine qua non, that for which the ANC has given its word — is absent.

This we know. To see what we can do about it, it might be useful to consider the causal links between each of the three fundamental state obligations.

For the moment, let’s deploy Maslow’s hierarchy of individual needs as an analogy for societal needs and consider which of the three fundamentals should be a priority, to use a favoured bureaucratic obfuscation for the government’s lack of planning.

Maslow would argue that without an adequate degree of physiological integrity, there can be no progress to anything. We must have health.

The alternative is disease or death. Without health, security or any form of actualisation matters naught, and for that there is ample evidence.

A great many South Africans are in ill health because they are underfed, and an even greater number who are officially considered to have access to sufficient nutrition are malnourished; that is, they are pumped up with sugar and related carbohydrate junk.

This is where it starts getting loopy. We know that more people would have access to better nutritional choices if they grew their own food, or some of it. And you don’t need a farm for that.

All you need is a repurposed can with a few holes punched in the bottom and filled with a handful of gravel and soil, et voila, there is your farm. Add five seeds. Weed out the weaklings when they sprout. Even the poorest soil will sustain green leafy veggies, provided you water the plants every day.

The trouble is, few hungry and malnourished people know how easy it is. To know that you can wean your palate off sugar in no time and grow your own food requires a bit of education – just a tiny bit. But an appropriate education is perhaps the state’s greatest failure, and because of that, it fails at everything.

The third fundamental follows. If you’re not safe — if thieves steal your spinach instead of growing their own — what is the point? And then, if you don’t ingest enough proper nutrients because you are unsafe, you are unable to educate yourself about a farm in a can. And so it goes, around and around, trapped in a cycle of fate that will always end badly.

You may argue that it is unreasonable to expect society to practise this kind of self-sufficiency at a sustainable scale, but is it? The only variable in this (simplified) admonition to take personal responsibility for one’s life is that you need access to water.

We know that in the name of transformation, Water and Sanitation Minister Nomvula Mokonyane has made access to safe water worse for those who need it most, blaming the crisis on the drought and then seeking divine intervention to save her reputation.

However, that does not relieve us of our responsibility to take action.

ALL YOU NEED IS A CAN WITH A FEW HOLES PUNCHED IN THE BOTTOM AND FILLED WITH GRAVEL AND SOIL

You can collect a litre of water from just a millimetre of rain deposited on a 1m-by-1m surface and use it for your farm in a can if you collect it in a sugar-drink bottle. Just pour the sugary junk down the toilet first.

This little analogy does lean towards hyperbole, but the principle stands.

The homunculi who populate the ANC government need to understand that without education, health or safety, nothing will advance, let alone the actualisation presented as transformation. Even this government will run out of transactions to tax when we stop transacting.

But loopy is as loopy does. We have a deal with the government, but it is not holding up its end of the bargain. What is wrong with us? Is it so that the road to perdition is infinitely more attractive than doing the right thing?