Another sleepless night – after a day when rain pouring down like heavens floodgates have been opened to flush away all the dirt and dust – sleep has only come 
for hours.
South Africa celebrated Women’s Day; and because it happened to be a Sunday – the early morning hours promise another day of holiday. But does it really matter?
For so many people 136 days of lockdown meant many such days off – days without earning any money, days without having anything to do than to worry about how to feed the family, how to survive without income, how to bring food on the table and how to keep sane and safe.
While ANC cadre, their families and the connected are busy with syphoning money into their own pockets by abusing tender for PPE and other life saving goods, while they are busy creating new companies to steal and loot the state coffers, the ordinary man seems to be sentenced to struggle for survival; taking hostage by politicians who up their game of ideology and ignorance: “There is no way in which you can assume that yesterday’s oppressed will not become tomorrow’s oppressor”, so the Desmond & Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation.
A bitter truth for a country which dreamt 1994 of a rainbow nation, which envisaged a society where equality and self-determination would trump over an ugly past. Dreams often forget human factors: greed and entitlement in this case, and the re-write of history, which made one movement the sole liberator of South Africa, scratching out the efforts of millions around the world contributing to the birth of the new democracy. After a furious start with tons of good intentions the inner dynamics of a splitting ANC spelled trouble for the nation – the lost years of corruption and state capture cemented the downfall and Covid-19 brought all the dilemmas and cover-ups, the unsolved and unhealed to the forefront.
It creates sleepless nights for those still dreaming of South Africa as a force for good in this world – the Madiba magic so many have forgotten about or even talking down this time of hope and aspiration.
It creates sleepless nights for those still dreaming of South Africa, cradle of mankind, as the place, where the word “race” is abolished to categorize people and building a society out of the broken fragments history provides.
South Africa is at a decisive point:
It can choose to continue destroying the very fabric of society, shut down any aspiration for some generations to come, or it can rise like Phoenix out of the ashes turning around the path of social destruction. There is no place to hide any more; Covid-19 has taken away any hiding place and highlighted the state of affair: it is up to us, to everybody living in this beautiful part of the world to decide on turning around and away from the abyss or giving in into a further eroding of decency and human rights, of morality and justice – serving only those who calling the shots in a society, which is one of the most unequal in the world.
Filed under: Africa, Politics and Society, Reflection, Society and living environment, South Africa, 1994, Africa, lockdown, lockdown rules, Madiaba magic, Phoenix out of Ashes, Rainbow Nation, south africa, Tutu
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