Listen to the sane voices of the country
IMAGINE that a slice of life’s randomness unravels before your very eyes – a Kombi filled with the raucous laughter and mischief of 18 children returning home from school and suddenly the crunch at high speed of a mass of steel hurtling against another mass of steel, tanks of petrol bursting into a blazing inferno.
Steel melts and terrified screams are stifled as living human flesh is devoured by raging flames in seconds seeming like an eternity.
Seven children are mercifully pulled out but the rest, who could have been your children, your grandchildren, perish before your very eyes, even as their screams pierce your very being, making Dante’s inferno look like a Sunday school picnic.
This act of recklessness, this wanton carnage is but a symptom of the systematic devaluation of life unleashed on us since the “discovery” of gold and diamonds.
Unmitigated profiteering saw the introduction of migrant labour, which tore part family life rendering families dysfunctional for generations to come.
Fatherless children scavenge in rubbish heaps and dirt bins or inhale meth fumes to escape their sorry lot.
Life is cheap and violence stalks the land.
A street vendor is stabbed to death by three nonchalant assailants in full view of the public over a packet of cigarettes.
A school principal is repeatedly stabbed on school premises – a reprisal for acting against a pupil, who shot another pupil.
A premier threatens whites joining protesters of all races against Zuma’s excesses saying, “We are many and you are few!”
My mind goes back to that historic day when an adoring throng waited to greet the newly released Nelson Mandela at the King’s Park Stadium.
There was a ripple of expectation among the ANC faithful, gatvol with the violence unleashed on its members by an embattled regime fighting a rear-guard battle to stave off the inevitable by fomenting black-on-black violence.
Poet Nise Malange described how it was not uncommon to stumble on a corpse on dusty township roads.
A bread winner, a father, a mother, a son, a daughter would not be returning home that day.
Griffiths Mxenge and his equally courageous wife, Victoria, were to pay the ultimate price in the most hideously brutal fashion for their steadfast, unyielding opposition to an illegal, racist regime.
There was every expectation that the great man would issue a stern warning, if not give clear notice of severe reprisals to the enemies of democracy.
Instead Madiba, majestic and unwavering, exclaimed: “Throw your spears, your pangas into the sea!”
In the lead up to and during Codesa under the worst provocations, even during the chilling black-on-black violence in Boipatong and other acts of violent destabilisation, an exemplary ANC stuck by its guns. No violence, no racism. On the eve of democratic elections, Chris Hani, the nation’s favourite son, is assassinated in cold blood.
The world holds its breath but our fledgling democracy pulls off a miracle and is able to stave off a racial conflagration second to none.
The new government of national unity went further.
It scrapped the death penalty and gave women the right to terminate unwanted pregnancies.
Yet, while these initiatives were a major step towards discarding old shibboleths that entrenched backwardness, and indeed barbarism in the name of law and order, what it failed to do concomitantly was to address the fundamental causes of mass poverty – the economic disempowerment of the masses, following wholesale dispossession through the sweeping 1913 Land Act, which reserved over 80% of the land for exclusive white use and ownership.
While we launched the most effective tax collection system in the world, the much touted GEAR policy was a disastrous cop out.
For once Thabo Mbeki got it right when he said South Africa was a divided society, one black and poor and the other white and wealthy.
Oh yes, a black middle class is emerging, taking full advantage of BEE, displaying, in the process, all the ugly trappings of the nouveau riche.
Blue Light Brigades flash through our streets and a convicted felon, paroled on the pretext of terminal illness, roams the golf links with impunity.
A society grappling with the massive problems facing a historically disempowered underclass watches helplessly as corruption thrives unabated.
The cliché which states that “absolute power corrupts absolutely” is again played out with mind boggling impunity.
While sane and courageous voices such as Thuli Madonsela did offer much hope, Zuma and his network of cronies in Parliament continue to take full advantage of a parliamentary system that renders parliamentarians accountable not to constituencies but to the ANC, facilitating state capture and the looting of billions while a pupil falls to his death in the school’s latrine pit.
No wonder crime and xenophobia are on the march, so too violence in schools and the carnage on our roads, let alone violent service delivery protests.
The minister of transport says the only answer is behaviour change.
How can that happen in a nation that is at war with itself, with an education system held to ransom by a trade union given to entitlement instead of excellence?
Thank heavens though that state capture has hitherto failed to ensnare the judiciary, the single last hope in a sea of deepening despair.
After Pravin Gordhan’s peremptory sacking, citizens went on the march, saying clearly “so much and no more” evoking echoes of the launch of the United Front.
Once more the nation holds its breath, this nation nurtured in a culture of dissent since the days of the Khoi and San when its leaders rose in defiance. Equally courageous visionaries such as Sol Plaatje, Mahatma Gandhi, Chief Albert Luthuli, Bram Fischer, Nelson Mandela, and Oliver Tambo, nurtured the ethos which produced the Freedom Charter which among other civil liberties urges that:
“The national wealth of our country, the heritage of all South Africans, shall be restored to the people;
“Restrictions of land ownership on a racial basis shall be ended, and all the land redivided among those who work it, to banish famine and land hunger;
“The law shall guarantee to all their right to speak, to organise, to meet together, to publish, to preach, to worship and to educate their children.”
In the words of Pravin Gordhan, there is nought but to once more “organise, organise, organise”, and to speak with one voice if we want to take back our beloved country.