Things are wrong in South Africa. We all know it. The malfunctioning and collapse of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are mere manifestations of this wrong.
The inability of the state to provide and maintain basic infrastructure, like the postal service and housing provision, all point to this sense of a looming apocalyptic catastrophe awaiting us in the future.
We may not get mail now, but in future, we might not have food or fuel or life-saving surgeries.
As radio show host Refilwe Moloto said recently, we have a president more obsessed with his iPad than his constitutional obligations; more with his own business interests than his role as leader of this country. We get a sense that being the president is a side hustle for Cyril Ramaphosa.
There is silence from the president on worrying national trends which led former president Thabo Mbeki to say this week that the president has no plan.
From mass killings across the country to the destruction of infrastructure, this president has adopted a silence that is leaving us all reeling and infuriated.
During the pandemic, he addressed the nation on several occasions. But nothing seemed natural. There was never any heart in it. Post-pandemic he has all but disappeared. And so has his party. We are no longer governed. All that we really have are people who are occupying seats of power for five years and then contest it again for a further five years. They are there only to oversee their own enrichment and our increasing poverty and hardship.
During his Sona speech in February 2018, the president announced a number of initiatives to get South Africa moving forward.
From a jobs summit to a national social compact to aggressively pursuing re-industrialisation and localisation, all would be rolled out, leading to a million jobs being created within three years.
Agriculture would become a gateway economy and mining was listed as a sunrise industry. SOE governance would be fixed and a campaign to address cancer was even listed.
When the president made his speech he said South Africa had 17 million grant recipients. Today we have 18 million grant recipients costing R222 billion. In addition to all this, the president announced the building of smart cities and a Digital Industrial Revolution Commission to lead our response to the AI age.
How does a president who announced all these initiatives a mere four years ago, at a time of great crisis in our nation, go silent on his people and then jokingly talk about the presidency being a side job to his ankole cattle farming?
We should be deeply worried about the state of our nation. It is not just the institutional collapse and service delivery issues that should concern us; it is the notion that the government has gone silent on us. They have gone silent on the issues that should dominate their leadership and discussion with us.
How can a governing party which has held power for 28 years be found to only be talking about the renewal of their party, and not the devastating challenges and enormous hardships their failures birthed?
I was driving on the N2 in the South Cape a while back and stopped to give a hitch-hiking grandmother and her two grandchildren a lift.
Talking politics in the car, she said to me: “These politicians only want your vote and not your voice.” The politicians have silenced the voters over the past 28 years. There is no room for robust dialogue anymore. Now they too have gone silent.
Like lambs, we are being led to a slaughter of our voices. In politics, there are two sacred things: your vote and your voice. The only way you prevent the slaughter of both is to use both to secure the future for yourself and all South Africans.
In the words of Hugh Masekela’s Thuma Mina, “I wanna be there when the people start to turn it around.”
* Lorenzo A Davids.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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