EDITORIAL OPINION The good, bad and ugly

AT THIS precise moment, traffic is possibly being diverted due to another violent protest over service delivery/unemployment/education etc somewhere in South Africa.

People’s properties are being damaged, roads are being blockaded, infrastructure (paid for with hard-earned money) is being destroyed and the police are out in force.

Such occurrences have, frighteningly, become everyday events in a troubled country. People are angry for various reasons and they are making it shown.

Sadly, their anger is often misdirected and the innocent (and often their own communities) suffer as a result. That is the bad part of it. So what is good about service delivery protests? Well, for one thing, it does make people sit up and notice although I fear (with the frequency thereof) people are becoming rather resigned to it and not even trying to find out the true reasons.

It is good in that people are having their say and highlighting their concerns, but, on the other side of the coin (the bad side) once vandalism and violence become part of it, the sympathy of most people ebbs away.

The ugly part is that some protests may indeed have a deeper agenda which has the potential to destabilise and encourage anarchy and chaos.

The day we lose sight of reasonable interaction and communication is the day that we might as well put the lights off in South Africa and call it a day.

The day when people stop believing in the possibility of meeting, talking and finding a way forward – a joint way forward – is the day when the country will near its end.

Rights are simple things after all – a right to protest is a given of a democracy, but does such a right extend to malicious damage to property? Is it, however, justifiable if people believe that their voices are not being heard and they claim such actions as a last resort?

The country is already burning and some may believe that, already, it is too late. Yet, while hope prevails, all is not lost. As South Africans, we’ve proven that in the past. Directed, goal-orientated action in terms of discussion and resultant action, done with empathy and consideration, could make the difference.

But we need that now – tomorrow it may well be too late.