Dear South Africans (and anyone else who might be bored enough to listen in the misguided belief this country is a leading nation in Africa): This is the State of Our Nation right now.
Most of this will be obvious to ordinary citizens but we say it because it is highly unlikely our leader, President Cyril Ramaphosa, will be totally honest this evening when he addresses parliament.
We are a Third World catastrophe (we won’t use Donald Trump’s colloquialism). We don’t have enough electricity to make our country function properly. Our streets and even our highways are being slowly eaten away by potholes.
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Crime ripples through all levels of society – from street stabbings to tender looting. Our civil service is anything but civil – it is overpaid, underworked and arrogant. Our state education system is going backwards. Our state health system is going backwards.
Our state-owned enterprises are going backwards. Anything touched by the ANC is going backwards. To say these things is not, as our president suggested this week, mere “moaning” and nor is it racism by those hankering after an apartheid past.
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Racism is worse than it has ever been and the gap between the races threatens to turn into a gulf. Unemployment is soaring. People are struggling to make ends meet. Some go hungry every night.
Yet, at the same time, the gap between rich and poor is one of the highest in the world. Our new monied elite is often brash and crass in flaunting its wealth.
To hope that the ANC will haul us out of this morass into which they, themselves, tossed us, is not just naïve, it is foolish. Ramaphosa is no hero. He is just another ANC cadre. Real change will not happen while those cadres are still in charge.
Think about that in 2024.
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