Before you start reading here, you should download and read this document (250k) - or what follows will not make much sense.
Dr du Plessis' document arrived in my mail box last week and initially, I regarded it just another one of those rants from people who have fled and now feel competent and authorised to complain about what is wrong with the country. I don't know who du Plessis is, but for once the content is actually worth a read. It's interesting and almost entirely based on what seems to be (realistic and historical) fact. There's no hysteria and it is free from the usual darkies in the cupboard blare, which almost certainly means that there has been some thought applied to the subject in hand and that it is not just a knee-jerk against our elected masters.
Reading this piece, I began to think that our disfunctional government is starting to echo that of the Soviet Union, which met its long overdue end in 1982. This has its genesis not just because of the neo-Stalinist ideas of our leaders, nor their unremitting drive for centralisation and control. It has also happened because the greater bulk our voters have few palatable political options at the polls, are poorly educated, vote according to their cultural beliefs (also largely lack-of-education driven), are the victims of vicious intimidation and finally, uninterested in anything beyond improving themselves and their personal lot. Who can blame them?
As the article says, the almost complete inability to do the work has until recently, been obscured by the chorus of grunting from the porcine snouts in the Great Trough of State. Suddenly however, the spotlight is on and the cast on stage have to finally act their roles properly, or the mooted meltdown will inevitably happen.
So, what to do?
I've no acceptable idea, actually. And that's not an ideal solution. We are all aware that 2011 brings municipal elections and 2014 another round of voting for the Great Trough of State. We've already seen the game the ANC is planning with the toilets issue in Gugs. It also follows that the ANCYL is to be deployed in the Cape in an attempt to regain control of the province by making it ungovernable. I don't know much about where this will lead, but you can be certain that intimidation, violence and the destruction of both public and private assets is high on the list of priorities for the loyal cadres. One thought; once the ANC is back in power, it will simply be a matter of deleting the "able" and replacing it with "ed" and the pillage of state and provincial assets will start anew.
Behind the scenes and making policing in the townships worse, is the recent re-deployment of Mzwandile Petros, the SAP's point man in the Cape. If you recall, he was suddenly moved to Gauteng late last year and replaced with yet another loyal cadre. My guess is that the DA-governed Cape's leadership had managed to exercise some control over Petros, making it necessary for him to do a halfway decent job - hence his re-deployment. In the time available before the elections, the new man might not prove to be so malleable and as a result, be significantly less supportive of his city, while choosing to turn a Nelsonian blind eye to the ANCYL and allowing it to run rampant in the townships...
Back to du Plessis; the system is crumbling because AIDS is killing off large numbers of the population, while more than a million others have fled for greener pastures elsewhere, my kids amongst them. Did you know that in addition to a reputed 800,000 Saffers in London, there are approximately 50,000 in each of the Trucial States? That's more than a million salary-earning, tax paying, useful members of South African society gone and we haven't started counting how many more are in Australia and New Zealand yet.
And, despite this huge loss, our population continues to climb - fuelled no doubt by immigrants from Africa, fleeing the kind of despotic rule that is starting to look more and more possible here. Where will they (and all of our own people) go then?
Back once again to Collapsing SA; it's terribly easy to get swept up in recrimination and angst when writing about these things. Balance is critical however; I wish I had a Rand for every word I've written in recent years that has never seen the light of day. So no, I don't think we are close to the kind of meltdown du Plessis sees, although the slide from here to there could be shockingly easy and quick. A shambles? Perhaps not. Why you ask? Well, just this last week we've just seen some determination from our Home Affairs department, setting a deadline for registration of illegal Zimbabweans and keeping to it. There's a first.
True. But how and when they complete the registration process will perhaps be more illuminating.
Unfair? Perhaps, but if Home Affairs' information and my sums are correct, the number of immigrants that pitched-up to be registered sounds like like a tiny proportion of the more than 1 million Zims in the country. What will the government do about the several hundred thousand that didn't bother to apply? Deportation sounds unlikely, as we have neither the means, capability or infrastructure to round up, detain (pending deportation) and transport these people back to their own country. How will we deal with the claims that we will be sending them home to intimidation and worse at the hands of Mad Bob and what is starting to look like his hand-picked, soon-to-be-installed successor?
As if that weren't bad enough, how will we stop them all from simply coming back again? Our borders have already proved to have the integrity of a moth eaten sock, so what then?
And, when up to a million Zims are back, looking for work and displacing unionised South Africans because they have been told that they are entitled to work fewer and fewer hours every week for an increasingly unrealistic wage. What then?
Somehow, things are still working reasonably well and we're just hoping that either realisation will dawn, or the collapse doesn't all happen at once. If that happens, we're all fucked.
So again I ask; where will we all go then?
In closing, as I prepared this piece, I read an item in the UK press that the coalition government, keenly aware of its need to satisfy the voters, has asked for suggestions as to what and how the population at large would want them to change things. The details aren't relevant here, the lesson may be that they asked at all. Can you imagine that happening in South Africa in 2011?
