Stop ignoring SA reality
MAY Jimi Hendrix forgive me for butchering the lyrics of Little Wing, but as far as 21 years of ANC governance – and I’m being generous when calling it that – are concerned, it pretty much goes like this: “Well, the ANC’s walking through the clouds/ With a circus mind/ That’s running wild/ Butterflies and zebras and moonbeams/ And fairytales/ That’s all the ANC ever thinks about”. This is because the divorce from reality proudly evinced by its deployed cadres from local to national level has brought about almost nothing but dysfunctional government. This is despite years of warning and pleading. An increasingly alienated agricultural sector has been reduced by at least tens of thousands of farmers who have left the country while the few remaining in the Free State join to pray for rain to fall from our country’s hot, indifferent skies. Why? Simply because as sure as God made little green apples, neither the ANC nor the bunglers it has placed in command of the ship of state have any cooking clue how to repair, then move the wreck that is South Africa out of the sand and back into the ocean of prosperity. Worse, they have no urge to admit their lack of knowledge and competence either. Instead they prefer to classify water reports “because the data is subject to interpretation”, as the water affairs minister said once (news flash, Madam Minister, everything is subject to interpretation, including the almost incomprehensible and irrelevant utterances of your colleagues).
The government threatens “comrades” who tell the ANC to wake up to the reality of a failed tripartite alliance, and asks a population dealing with parched lips and waterborne diseases not only to endure so-called “level 2 water-shedding” (water cuts in denialist government code) in Johannesburg, but also reduce water consumption even more. This while ANC-run municipalities leave burst pipes to leak in the streets for weeks on end! At what point will the people get fed up and thirsty enough to begin turning first on each other, then on the government? At what point on this downward slope will the ANC and the government it leads begin to hold accountable the corrupt and the incompetent “comrades” they have shoved down our throats for two decades? At what point in our desperation are the ANC and its leadership going to stop walking through the clouds with a circus mind that’s running wild? Even more important to our current “challenge”, when are they going to deal effectively with the water issue on a national scale? We’re up the creek, but it has dried up. Right now, having a paddle doesn’t matter because we’ve got to get out of the canoe and risk broken ankles before we die of dehydration or cholera, and I’m not sure which fate is worse. Oh Lord, please give rain to our farmers and burst the pipe to Luthuli House, ‘cause they don’t need it anyway since all the ANC big shots on TV have had bottled water in front of them for years.
