Joburg fire shows deep rot in SA

“Our infrastructure is ageing”. This is something we hear almost everyday. This, in essence, is a very unfortunate statement.

When public officials say this, it means they’re clueless about what to do with ageing infrastructure. The country is rotting and yet we have officials driving top-of-the-range cars, living in expensive upmarket areas and owning holiday homes in exotic countries.

These are people who handle tenders to shore up our infrastructure. It looks like most of them just receive salaries and do nothing about what they are paid to do. Others simply hire dodgy companies that use inferior quality material at exorbitant rates.

That cheap material inadvertently becomes part of the problem. It’s sad to note that the Joburg building that caught fire was always disaster waiting to happen.

Now, people have lost their lives. In this country, we seem to talk about our problems more than we do anything to sort them out.

It’s baffling that provincial government has admitted that the building was an ongoing concern, yet nothing was done. At times, the most thankless job is to be an occupational safety and health practitioner.

Then you have an unenviable job of exposing even your own employer who may try to sweep matters of their own careless behaviour under the carpet.

Anything that concerns safety of workers can’t be hidden. I am gutted for the families of those firefighters. We need to change our attitudes. Richardson Mzaidume

Pimville