STATE GETS MONEY FOR NOTHING

Metro cops check licence discs while druggies direct the rush-hour traffic

Iwas sitting in peak-hour traffic on the corner of Jan Smuts Avenue and Bompas Road in Joburg, with traffic inching forward. We were in the middle of yet another power cut, what we euphemistically and wrongly call load-shedding, and the economy was losing millions with every minute we were sitting there.

If you listened carefully, you could even hear the depressing sound of businesses closing their doors and workers losing their jobs.

After a while I finally reached the dead traffic lights. Two young men, their clothes dirty and scuffed shiny from sleeping rough and not being washed for a long time, were directing the traffic. I have written about the highly addictive street drug nyaope (a concoction of heroin, painkillers, antiretrovirals, cannabis and other ingredients) since the mid-2000s, and I could tell the two were high as hell from the ubiquitous drug.

They were gamely directing the traffic up and down Jan Smuts, one of the most important traffic corridors through the city. I obeyed their instructions, and went on my way south towards Rosebank. Further on, at Jan Smuts and Bolton

Road, two youngsters — similar dress, similar mien of great equanimity brought on by the killer nyaope — were directing the traffic.

Just 20m from where the homeless, drug-addled boys were directing the traffic, seven metro police officers were stopping cars and checking drivers for traffic violations. Over the past three weeks I have seen this exact scene replayed on Marlboro Drive, near Eastgate shopping mall, in

Tshwane near Marabastad and on Oxford Road in Rosebank.

We have ceded control to unqualified individuals who are possibly high on drugs. We follow their instructions dutifully, without question, and lie to ourselves that everything will be fine.

It cannot be. Rumour has it that on Jan Smuts and Glenhove just the other week, the two boys both opened the traffic to both sides. A head-on collision occurred. Talk about an accident waiting to happen.

I tell this story because we need to stop this trend in our society where we pay people to do a job and then sit and watch while they don’t do the job they are paid to do. Then someone else does the job for them.

From traffic control to running stateowned enterprises (SOEs), we have ceded the running of the country to the unqualified, the corrupt, the idle.

Public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan told parliament this week that the government has pumped R233.6bn into bailouts for SOEs over the past five years, while receiving a dividend payout of just R1m from one SOE. Anywhere else in the world Gordhan would be fired. In South Africa, he is probably receiving hugs for a job well done. On his watch, Transnet cannot get goods to ports, Eskom cannot provide electricity, Denel is on its knees, the South African Post Office is broken, and so on.

There is rampant criminality at

Eskom. Yet the police have done nothing about it. Instead, business organisations have had to pony up cash and resources to help investigate the criminality (that business-funded investigation, carried out by dodgy apartheid crooks pretending to be detectives, turned into a disaster). The point is, why did it have to be funded by the private sector at all, when we pay the police to do exactly this work?

At every turn in South Africa, work that must be done by the public sector is now done by the private sector. We are reaching a stage where middle-class South Africans leave their homes only to be frisked by metro cops seeking bribes.

We got here because President Cyril Ramaphosa is not cracking the whip in his cabinet. Most of his cabinet members are in place merely because they have constituencies in the party. That means Ramaphosa can’t discipline them for their failures. They can’t be held accountable. He then appoints ministerial task teams, judicial inquiries and all sorts of other alternative structures to do the jobs his ministers won’t do.

The danger is that we will wake up one day soon and there will be two South Africas: one where the private sector does everything, and the tragic other where the government does everything

and nothing works. Then it will all explode.

This is an emergency.