Consider your fellow road users

SOUTH Africa joins much of the world in celebrating Easter this weekend. It is a time of deep reflection, culminating in joy for the Christian world, something that has great resonance in our country as we edge ever closer to our sixth general elections in less than a month’s time.

May 8 is an auspicious day – two days before the 25th anniversary of the presidential inauguration of the father of the modern South Africa, Nelson Mandela. The symbolism of that day has faded somewhat in the intervening years; many of the voters who go to the polls this year will not even have been born when he became president.

This in itself is both a blessing and a curse; they are not weighed down by the shackles of past prejudices, but neither do they have the context that their elders have, knowing how close to the edge of the abyss we teetered as we navigated the transition from minority rule.

This year’s elections are just as momentous – we have emerged from a very dark chapter in our history, a decade of institutionalised kleptocracy and the suborning of the very agencies established by Mandela and our other leaders to protect us. The false rhetoric at the hustings would suggest that we are stepping over the threshold into a failed state, where its people are hellbent on killing each other once again because of skin colour and privilege.

This is a travesty of what was created a generation ago – and of the seeds that were sown in Kliptown in 1955. We need to recommit to working towards the dream that spurred those that went before, sustaining them through detentions, state violence and even death.

Nationhood doesn’t begin and end at the polls, it starts with the little things, like thinking about the effects of our actions on others. Let’s start by driving considerately as we return home after this long weekend.