Have the will to live but body is betraying us
IATTENDED a 21st birthday celebration a few days ago. I realised with a shudder how long it has been since I was this tender age. I couldn’t imagine, at 21, that I would even see 80, let alone be married for 57 years.
Yet daily I meet folks who proudly announce that they are 79, 80, 81 and so forth.
I met a beautiful lady who looked so good it was hard to accept that she was 90. (That one’s for you, aunty Kathleen).
In my day, anyone older than 50 was old. Anything older than that, and they were revered as ancient.
I recall how our purchases of life insurance or retirement annuities were centred around ages 60 to 65.
That was the life expectancy way back in the 1960s.
I remember the insurance agent underlining the fact that bread, 30 years on, would cost about R30 a loaf.
Those dire predictions had us frantically signing the application for life insurance.
There is a word for discrimination against age these days.
According to the political science academic, Susan
Pharr, it joins racism, sexism, classism, ableism, anti-semitism and heterosexism as the seven social and politically incorrect isms that have the ability to control and destroy lives. It is called ageism.
I was offered a credit facility by my bank at the age of 70 (10 years ago). I must have looked confused. But she sweetly explained that the banks did not discriminate on age in fiscal transactions. That was as frightening as it was reassuring.
It underlined that nowadays the aged are not 60, but 70 and upwards.
A little while ago, in my hometown, we laid to rest a grand old lady of 100, chipper and sprightly up to the day the bugle sounded for her.
So what has changed? Better medication? Alternate lifestyles? Healthier diets? More gymnasia for fitness? I don’t remember any of those when it comes to the big guys of the Old Testament.
The infamous Cain lived to be 730 years old. Adam, Noah, Methuselah and Jared, a forefather of Noah, all made it to over 900 years!
What were they eating (or smoking)?
Old age is fine. Long life is fine, but have we made the adjustments to cope with this reality?
The mind survives, as does the will to live, but the body betrays us, as TS Eliot so shudderingly reminds us.
So us old men with wrinkled dugs who have seen it all need to be looked after in a special way.
We need to upgrade the facilities in order to preserve and retain the wisdom and experience locked in these long years.
We have been around for a long time, showing great heart against life’s vicissitudes.
How about showing us some heart? GOOD service delivery is vital for any community.
It is an important element that all ruling governments across the world must adhere to when coming into power after an election.
After all, service delivery is what their election campaigns are premised on – good delivery of basic services.
Over the past few years, more than ever before, plenty of people are leaving their homes in search of a better life elsewhere.
The United Nations projects that by 2030, the number of people living in cities would have risen to 5 billion.
This means the resources required to govern a particular city will be stretched further and further as governments and municipalities seek to accommodate the high number of city residents.
But even then, how do those in power meet the demands of highly populous communities and fulfil the mandate of Sustainable Development Goal 11 – sustainable cities and communities?
A few months ago, the Arvind Kejriwal-led Aam Aadmi Party known as the APP in New Delhi, India, introduced doorstep delivery of public services to its residents.
The services included driving licences and marriage certificates. The aim of the APP was to ensure these services were delivered to residents at the place of their choice.
Through this process, applicants can set a date and time for mobile sahayaks to visit their homes to collect forms, documents and fees.
When the documents have been processed and are ready, they are sent back to their homes via speed post.
Times are adjusted to suit the applicant’s needs. In February, APP added 30 more doorstep projects in the city to fast track service.
Some may ask why so much effort and, in South Africa, where do we even start when some of the systems are failing. APP’S provision of speedy services to a city with a population of 29 million people has nothing to do with luxury but simply speaks of a political party that has committed to finding innovative solutions and putting its people first.
This move is precisely what the South African government should premise its Batho Pele project around – placing the country’s citizens first by making their lives easier and speeding up development.
Perhaps public servants should leave their air-conditioned offices and go to the masses.
Yes, we have seen SA health care workers go into communities and provide much-needed services and medicine to ailing patients.
But what about the other departments?
Helen Clark, administrator of the UN Development Programme once said: “Often big resources to support a country only come when it is plunged into severe crisis, when a stitch in time might have saved nine.”
Our government departments can no longer wait until the 11th hour to fix small cracks in the system which have often turned into monumental disasters needing even bigger resources to fix the issue.
Maybe what New Delhi has done may not be specifically tailored for our societies or work the exact same way, but it is an example we can all learn from.
Noni Mokati is the group development content editor for Independent Media