From wrong to useless to criminal

I WAS about five years old when I first noticed things were wrong in this country.

Rama, the young black lady and my daytime carer, wiped my porridge off my face in the kitchen, but ate hers in the back yard under the apricot tree.

I named her Rama because mom always moaned that she put too much margarine on the bread.

I asked mom why Rama couldn’t eat with me at the kitchen table and was just told that I wouldn’t understand because I’m too young.

Well, I’m now older than my parents were in those lazy, carefree times of Maltabella pap and apricots, and I still don’t get it.

Later, around 1983, I realised again that some things weren’t just wrong in the republic of safari suits and Rembrandt van Rijn Filter de Lux, but actually quite bizarre.

I made this curious observation during a trip we took to Jo’burg to visit my aunt living in the suburb of Norwood.

Dad, not being used to more than three other cars on the road, panicked and lost all sense of direction and self-composure just after the Uncle Charlies interchange.

Driving around searching for a board to tell us where to go, or a sign from Heaven (when in trouble my family pinned their faith on everything available), a traffic cop on a motorbike pulled up next to us and indicated to dad to wind down his window.

“Mister, do you know where you’re going? This is the road into Soweto. Do you want to die?”

What happened next was scary. Dad pulled the handbrake up on our avo green Peugeot 504 and turned around in a cloud of dust with tyres screeching.

By doing so, he nearly wiped the cop off his bike, but after a wobble to the left and a wobble to the right, the officer made an impressive recovery and switched on his blue light.

He then sped past and led us to safety, away from Soweto, with siren blaring.

That night, mom told Aunt Suzie that we escaped being necklaced by the skin of our teeth, and that the traffic officer was without any doubt sent by the Lord himself.

I dreamt of petrol and Firestone radial tyres.

The most recent reminder I got that this country has completely blown a gasket was just last week.

While watching a news interview with that other Rama (no relation to my Maltabella lady from 1978), the leader of a liberation movementcum-political-party-cum-criminal syndicate blamed the deaths of over 70 people (who were in this country illegally by the way), on apartheid.

And he said it in such a sincere way that it was obvious he actually believed himself.

What a complete idiot, and as fake as a pair of Nike takkies bought at a street corner in

Hillbrow, I’m telling you.

It’s been 30 years since apartheid was abolished and today, even more people are sitting under apricots and all sorts of other trees than back in the 1970s and 80s.

The only difference is that they are now sitting there because they are unemployed.

A whopping 5.6 million of them according to that very same political party-cum-criminal syndicate’s extremely modest (read fake) estimates.

And I hear the country is on the brink of bankruptcy.

So we’ve gone from being wrong to being absolutely, incredibly useless.

When will things come right for everybody in this country?

I’m asking for Rama (my carer from 1978), who phoned mom two days ago and told her how much she misses those days wiping Maltabella off my face, because the Post Office didn’t pay out her old age pension this month.

That is criminal!