Lorenzo Davids writes, ‘We were busy cheering their speeches while they were zipping the body bags. We were celebrating loaves of bread while they were counting bank notes. We were fighting for decent wages while they were counting their reprehensible millions.’ Picture: Oupa Mokoena/African News Agency(ANA)
The destruction is complete. It happened while we were clapping hands for our rulers.
We were busy cheering their speeches while they were zipping the body bags. We were celebrating loaves of bread while they were counting bank notes. We were fighting for decent wages while they were counting their reprehensible millions.
We realised too late that they were not here for the country we needed. They were here on a looting spree.
They talk of renewal. All we see is ongoing decay. Hammanskraal is the latest chronicle in this disaster series called “Thuma Mina”.
Hospitals, power stations, roads and other critical infrastructure are all at various stages of total collapse. Yet the-laughing-president-who-is-shocked tells us he knows nothing, is shocked and will establish a commission to send him a report. Then he laughs some more.
The billionaire cartels and their millionaire politicians have no fear of the South African population’s anger. With their foreign assets and private jets, they will do what all elites and their dictator-enablers do – they will board their private jets and sneak into their foreign homes and disappear. While they leave behind a burning, broken country.
And the arrogance of it all is that they will continue to earn revenue through nefarious means from the country they destroyed. The laughing-president-who-is-shocked has failed the people. The body bags in Hammanskraal are the evidence.
The dead children are the evidence. The body bags at Life Esidimeni are the evidence. Their corporate partners and non-profit service providers who boast massive investments are there only to build stronger balance sheets, not to build a better society.
The needs of South Africa’s poor are no longer a cause for these agencies. It is simply a line item, a tick-box exercise on their mission of seeking long-term sustainability.
The dead and the poor, who have no access to the billions of social spend because the money is sitting in investment accounts, are asking: Whose sustainability? Yours or the poor you say you are helping?
The opposition parties have been ensnared in this same arrogance. Trying to be better than Nelson Mandela and better than Helen Suzman, they have poured their oversized, putrid-smelling egos out on us.
We realised too late that they were no better than those who they protested. They simply want their turn at the wheels of power. Placating the same elite billionaire cartels, they polish their oppression so that it smells like freedom.
Meanwhile, the black, coloured and Indian poor remain.
Unashamed, they would celebrate building 50 houses while millions remain unhoused in South Africa. Most of us will have died and the unhoused of today will still be on some housing waiting list.
We should stop applauding dog treats. Show the poor where 300 000 houses will be built within the next five years.
The laughing-president-who is-shocked has no more answers. The academics will write thousands of words to explain their views to us.
The truth is our politicians have no more answers to give us. The system is collapsing. They know it. This is not being alarmist. This is a warning to you to no longer believe the lies you are being sold.
I have sat in the Genocide Museum in Rwanda. I have walked the streets of Sharpeville. I have walked down Thornton Road. Soon I will be visiting the roadblock site where the Cradock Four were abducted and later killed.
The new South Africa, also, is littered with false hope, marked by the grave mounds of those who never should have died.
The government of national unity in 1994 failed to do the critical work of advancing a prosperous unitary state. We have been burdened with a government of deadly factions, all poised to do whatever it takes to advance their own self-interests.
We are truly on our own. The country is on its knees. The laughing-president-who-is-shocked has left the building.
* Lorenzo A. Davids.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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