Stop banging pots for justice, use your vote

The inhabitants of my village have a habit of banging their pots and pans at 8pm every evening, reportedly to pay tribute to nurses and medical staff.

Maybe I am just a grumpy old git, but I don’t like it.

Not because it’s noisy or irritating.

Actually, I can ’ t hear it for the open fields beside my house.

For one, as far as I know, there are no nursing homes, medical clinics or hospitals within at least 10km.

So the nurses and medical staff can’t hear the banging, and anyway, I’m sure they have better things to do.

In this sense, the villagers are doing it for themselves.

I can’t help thinking that it’s like you and your mates taking a knee against racism — while standing around the braai and having a few beers in your Springbok jersey on a Sunday afternoon — but continue to underpay and mistreat your domestic worker.

Take comfort, dear banger, you’re in good company.

In Britain over the weekend, the blubbering buffoon of a prime minister, Boris Johnson, apparently lit a candle outside his home, and had the place bathed in blue light in support of the National Health Service.

He is just a nasty piece of work, and not worth discussing.

Or, maybe, as Marina Hyde of the Guardian wrote, “the prime minister is having an incredibly clichéd midlife crisis, and we’re all having to live in it”.

As far as my villagers are concerned, it really is an empty gesture in a country where nurses and medical workers are desperately underpaid, and medical services underfunded.

It is more significant when people in, say, Lombardy, Italy, or in Switzerland, make noises with their kitchenware — they have built and maintain an exceptional health-care system and infrastructure that is more accessible to the poor.

In so many places around the Eastern Cape — and elsewhere in the country — medical facilities are in varying states of collapse.

The government, if one can still call it that, remains exceedingly incompetent.

Apart from four or five people around President Cyril Ramaphosa whom you can trust, it’s hard to believe that anyone is in the ruling party for the sake of the public and common good.

About the health-care system in SA: The levels of inequality can be likened to structural cruelty.

Though some hospitals in the private sector seem wellequipped — even if they’re not all staffed with the most professional and trustworthy people, but that’s based on personal experience — public hospitals are veritable death traps.

They are, as someone once said, places where people go to die.

On a personal note, the relative immobility and the sedentary life I lead as a struggling writer has caused me to have a sciatica problem.

My doctor prescribed pain killers.

She also mentioned surgery as a last option.

Someone mentioned a physio, someone else a chiropractor — but I will not set foot in a medical facility during this pandemic. I will not even set foot out of home, if I can help it.

So, what does one do, instead of banging pots and pans?

It’s simple.

Vote the ruling party out of office.

We still have an outstanding constitutional democracy, though it is becoming tiresome to keep repeating that, given the state of the country, which gives citizens legal rights (and obligations), which include using all legal means available to change the government.

Then again, I just recalled how difficult it has been to get Andile Lungisa out of office, and he is not the exception, he is the rule — and that is just wrong.

It is also a view of the future (I know we can’t really look into the future), which is terribly bleak. On the basis of conditions as they exist, there is little chance that things will get better in our lifetime.

There is barely a municipality, a provincial government, a national agency or institution that is functionally operational, without need of more money.

And we are allowed to ask where all the money went, in the first place.

We are allowed to ask why public servants have become wealthy, while doing little, and (under the previous administration) farming out their jobs to consultants.

Ask the questions. Speak to your MP, if you can find one, and don’t let them get away with stock phrases like “we will look into it” or “it is being discussed in structures”.

The ruling alliance has made the word “structures” feel

‘So the nurses and medical staff can’t hear the banging, and anyway, I’m sure they have better things to do.

like a piece of something drifting in a sewer.

In the final analysis, elect a government that can restore confidence in the public service, and in this particular case, in a health-care system that is accessible, equitable, professional and that can be held responsible.

I am pretty convinced that banging pots and pans will not achieve any of that — it will just make you feel warm and fuzzy.