Are you better off now than 30 years ago?

Try to answer this question honestly. Do you think the state of the overall infrastructure of the country (roads, electricity, water supply, transportation) was better in 1993 (the last year of apartheid) than in 2023 (30 years since the end of apartheid)? I posed this question on my Twitter feed and 89% of respondents voted “yes definitely” and 11% said “no, better now”.

Of course, these Twitter polls are not representative of the general population, but 2,410 respondents are worth taking seriously.

Now I do not know who the 11% are but I suspect they live under some rocks in the Karoo, because the news from the wealthiest city on the continent is pretty dismal: weeks without water, hobbled by daily electricity outages, and cratering holes in more and more Johannesburg roads is not what we had on the eve of democracy. You can ask that question of almost any sector of the social and economic landscape, from education to health to urban housing.

Never before have I seen so many shelters going up along main roads into and out of our great cities as desperate citizens risk life and limb just trying to survive from day to day.

Are we paying attention to how this government has single-handedly wrecked the social and physical infrastructure that holds the country together?

With our 2024 elections looming, I recall an abiding memory of an election debate in another country.

President Jimmy Carter was facing up to candidate Ronald Reagan in the only debate of the 1980 presidential campaign when the Californian posed this zinger to his American audience: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”

To cut a long story short, the Hollywood actor went on to wipe out the sitting president in the elections and went on to spend two (in my view, disastrous) terms in the White House.

Of course, black South Africans especially are better off than during the apartheid years; whites too, though many won’t recognise the fact.

There is no state apparatus to randomly imprison and torture people for fighting for their freedom.

You are not locked up in a Bantustan and more and more black citizens have become leaders in business, industry and academia without those chains of white supremacy that held us down.

You can now swim at any beach, attend any school you wish to, and be a small business entrepreneur without being harassed. In theory.

The truth is you can’t actually swim at any beach because the Durban beaches were shut down in December because of rank incompetence on the part of the city leaders which caused dangerous sewerage dumping into the holiday waters.

You can’t actually attend any school you would like to because you need lots of money for fees, a house near a wellresourced school, and a transport system that works.

You likely had your small business ruined because the government could not keep the electricity on, meaning you lost customers and income, first because of Covid and then because of Eskom; you do not make the kind of profit margins that could afford generators or invertors and so your dreams sank as a struggling hairdresser or a small restaurant owner.

Not everyone has Shoprite’s capacity to spend R560m on diesel to run generators at their supermarket chains during the rolling blackouts, in only a sixmonth period!

So, here’s the question again.

Are you better off three decades later than you were in the last days of apartheid? the In shop your or day-to-day to her friend life’is s place their less crime than before?

Do you have more of a sense of personal safety and security than when apartheid collapsed?

Can your girl-child walk to without fear of being harmed?

Any honest South African would concede that we are in deep trouble on the criminal front.

In fact, we might well have tipped over so far that it is impossible to recover some sense of normalcy on the streets or in our barricaded homes.

Think for a moment of capacity and corruption in policing and let me use education examples.

It is now 260 days since the head of fleet management at the University of Fort Hare was brutally assassinated for putting an end to corruption in his division and still there are no arrests.

It is also 28 days since the bodyguard of UFH’S vice-chancellor died in a hail of bullets moments after dropping off his boss but still no arrests.

I have it on good authority that there is direct evidence on the perpetrators, including an audiotape, but nobody has been arrested or charged which is why so many people believe that this rot goes all the way to the top.

Meanwhile, the bodies pile up.

I ask you again, are you better off now than under apartheid?