Decades of looting have derailed public services and crushed trust as citizens watch leaders live large on their suffering.
There has been an explosion on the looting express. Slowly, the wheels are coming off and the scramble is on – some rush to evade accountability, others to conceal their complicity in the rot.
The house has been fumigated and the termites scatter.
South Africa has the means to accomplish greatness. Yet leadership has enriched itself at the nation’s expense.
Looting has become so rampant that we now watch, in real time, hospitals collapsing under life‑threatening demands.
Instead of buying life-saving machines, budgets were squandered on vanity.
Patients lie on the floor awaiting assistance, while the ordinary sokonnect is expected to survive on R350 a month.
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Meanwhile, presidents and Cabinet ministers have enjoyed the privilege of rushing abroad for treatment or receiving VIP care at private hospitals and 1 Military Hospital. The contrast is obscene. And I am fatigued.
The ordinary man and woman are told to comply, to curtail freedoms for the greater good.
Yet maladministration and looting are rife and an indecisive government continues to make poor choices – reactive when it should be proactive.
Citizens continue to do their part, but 31 years later, exhaustion is undeniable.
We are beat. The commissions of inquiry expose failed oversight, costing lives and draining tax coffers.
Fatigue, we are told not to allow in, has already settled comfortably in mind, body and spirit. While the layman complies, leadership betrays.
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Most disheartening has been the looting of funds meant for health care and industries under siege. Professionals – auditors among them – have lost their lives for daring to expose corruption.
Their deaths mark the weakening of the state, as government underperforms and officials remain complicit, incapable, or unwilling to rise to the occasion.
The looting is sickening. We have been afforded a front‑row seat to blatant corruption, the enlargement of private empires and the accumulation of generational wealth beyond imagination.
How can this be the ANC that once promised a better life for all?
Today, they recline in leafy suburbs while handing over shacks hoisted on Corobriks.
If this is the dream sold to my parents, then I am here for the refund.
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