SA needs development now

It is no surprise that the political impasse enveloping the city is economically stifling it, for these two cannot be divorced — they are sides of the same coin, and that is development.

The new SA was set to do that from 1994 with the RDP and other initiatives.

Perhaps we would be heading somewhere, and not have just progress and prosperity for the chosen few, as is the case now in this country as self-interest and preservation trump development.

The unsustainable reality is that as the most industrialised country on the continent, SA has to cater for the lives of its citizens and others from around the world who are escaping the hell-holes their countries are.

It is a matter of time before this unravels and becomes unbearable, as the xenophobic outburst have shown.

Sadly, these are going to escalate if only lip service is paid by a leadership which only appeases the apartheid beneficiaries and benefactors.

There are businesses under threat, as well as the wellbeing and welfare of the South African masses who feel hard done-by apartheid and now by a government that seems to prize votes that keep it in office rather than ones that truly redresses the ills of the past.

Development must transcend politics and sectarianinstead ism and “it’s our time to eat” mentality.

In a developing state, politics should guide and money or the economy help to implement, not the other way round.

Actually, for development in our state, politics should be banished.

It should have been easy to make or model a state that would achieve the opposite of what apartheid did.

We had good educational institutions like Wits, Rhodes and UCT which were respected throughout the world even at that time, and sports like rugby proved to be a force to recon with.

We could have maintained and built new state industries, of letting them collapse and blaming the past.

We must maintain and improve infrastructurally and technologically, and create engineers and artisans and not just graduates whose chief concern seems to be posting pictures of graduation and parties on social media.

We go all over the world to see best practices, and even undertake studies and courses to learn from the Germans, Japanese and Chinese.

But sadly we are a nation of also-rans and near-misses.

“If only” is our continued excuses, and we blame the system instead of using globalisation, while everyone is using it to work for themselves.

Pat Kondile