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It's really ironic that South African President Thabo Mbeki
positioned his latest State of the Nation address as the
beginning of an era of hope. Pragmatically, rather than
cynically, hope is about all the majority of the poor in South
Africa have to cling to. One of my black staff built a tiny home
in rural Pomeroy - an out of the way little area close to the
battle site of Rorke's Drift in Kwazulu Natal. I drove him and
his family down there for their Christmas holidays. Twelve years
into the new democratic dispensation, in which the ANC elected
promised potable water, some form of sewerage and certainly
electricity to the poor of South Africa, they have none of the
three. Let alone jobs or economic emancipation.
They don't even have decent primary healthcare in the area. A
case in point being a 28 year-old AIDS activist who recently
died because he couldn't afford the 60km taxi journey to the
nearest antiretroviral distribution point. Not that President
Mbeki believes HIV causes AIDS of course, because he doesn't. I
created irritation years ago by writing an article entitled,
'Make President Mbeki HIV positive.' My suggestion was that if
he doesn't believe HIV is the causative agent in AIDS, then let
him volunteer publicly to be infected with contaminated blood
and we'll all watch his progress,
The President's batty, Internet-derived dissident thesis that
poverty is the chief catalyst in AIDS, flies in the face of the
open secret that his own personal spokesperson Parks Mankahlana
and one of his close firebrand associates, Peter Mokaba, died
from AIDS. Yet both stuck to the presidential line that
antiretrovirals are poisons which kill.
The other shocker of course, was Mbeki being interviewed some
time back and saying that he didn't know of anyone who'd died of
AIDS. I'd invite him to go look at the Vosloorus cemetery on the
East Rand of Johannesburg and note the endless mounds of
freshly-closed graves. If the people are not dying of AIDS, then
what is the epidemic that's killing millions of young South
Africans? The number of funerals in that Vosloorus cemetery
alone, at weekends, is so overloading infrastructure that
literally in the middle of the funeral ceremony (I kid you not -
I experienced it first hand) a loudly beeping front-end loader
forces mourners aside and simply dumps the mound of soil next to
the open grave onto the coffin. It then moves on to the next of
at least a half dozen other funerals to do the same thing.
Funeral corteges are warned at the gate that they have x number
of minutes for their funeral so that the line of hearses and
mourners outside the cemetery can 'have their turn'.
I recently had to present a 'Scenario South Africa' overview to
a group of French journalists. It was a thoroughly depressing
exercise as I gathered information and worked through each
social silo of education, health, electricity, water,
sanitation, transport, law-enforcement (a sad oxymoron),
communications, unemployment, corruption, politics and finally
economics. On almost all fronts, the failure on the
service-delivery front is bordering on the catastrophic.
Infrastructure across the board (to whit, urban power and water
cuts, utterly screwed-up billing systems and roads) is slowly
but inexorably crumbling. The only thing functioning well if not
downright brilliantly, despite all other factors, is the
economy. It drags the rest of South Africa, kicking and
screaming, to God knows where. For the poor and disadvantaged in
the upcoming March 1st 2006 local elections, they'd better cling
to the president's vision of hope. That's all they've ever had
and all they'll continue to have and hold on to, if they
continue to vote ANC and therefore service non-delivery, in the
upcoming elections.
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