People must come together for social compact

SOME doctors emphasise the opportunistic nature of the coronavirus and its uncanny precision in speeding up and augmenting the underlying comorbidities that were lying low.

Similarly, this merciless agent is also busy pushing the fragile and ageing citadel that is the South African State into the abyss. The destruction long-wrought by the ruling elite’s disregard for the increasingly forgotten people was matched only by a clear disinterest in easing their suffering and an astonishing ideological shrillness that is less coherent than it is selfserving.

For too many years now and far too many times, many government officials have behaved not only incompetently and dishonestly, but downright immorally.

These elites have for so long behaved as though the State’s coffers are bottomless, and have been dipping into them with such success that most of them believed that, indeed, the feeding trough was fathomless.

This current coronavirus has driven us straight to rock bottom. We have literally run out of money.

And still, the elites’ minds are resolute, their skills unmatched, their intentions clear: it is still their time to feast.

At the same time, the people are past the point of hopelessness. Millions are hungry, angry and alone. Communities have been shattered. Once again, anger at our neighbours is the salve.

In a more caring society, this would have been the moment when all, young and old, mighty and weak, rich and poor, get together in a social compact that would pull us through the calamity.

Many did get together where the government failed, hundreds of community action networks stepped in heroically, providing the essential help and services that, in a “normal” country, would have been the duty of a democratically-elected government.

Instead of a social compact, governments are choosing social engineering that would have put some of the former Eastern European leaders to shame.

And, in this blindingly incompetent environment, we have learnt that well-connected cadres, the government and their assorted friends have managed to further enrich themselves by cashing in on the pain and suffering of the people.