Mass shootings, blackouts: Is South Africa a country without a plan?

There is a new way of creating gated communities that is developing in the townships in South Africa.

The thing about the street closures there is nothing organised about it.

In fact, residents of certain streets simply decide to make their street inaccessible by placing rocks at the entrance of the street, forcing all traffic to use only one entrance or exit.

Their reason? Crime. The streets are closed off to make it difficult for criminals travelling by car to gain easy access into those communities.

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The reasoning seems logical enough, but these rudimentary structures are illegal.

It is communities taking the law into their own hands and, some day, this will backfire when medical emergency services or even the police fail to gain access to these communities.

But this is nothing new, it is indicative of the general pessimism that is permeating all of South African society.

There is a feeling that law enforcement from government is not enough.

People have decided that unless they do things for themselves, nothing will get done because government is failing them.

Around this time last year, the country was in flames. Literally.

Former president Jacob Zuma had waited until the last minute to hand himself over to authorities to start serving his sentence for his decision not to testify at the Zondo commission.

The riots that followed at the behest of some of his followers brought much chaos and death in KwaZulu-Natal and parts of Gauteng.

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Businesses were looted and some of them destroyed, never to recover again.

The police could only watch along with the rest of society.

Where they did respond, their actions were so inadequate that looters could even take breaks and start the looting again at a later time.

That death and destruction was going on at the height of the Covid pandemic which, by itself, had brought so much suffering and death.

Instead of looting and death the country needed reassurance that things would be good again, that the chaos would abate and the death and destruction would pass.

The reassurance that where possible, the law would go after those who fanned the riots and those who committed murders during those riots.

Nothing has happened. Instead, the country has been waking up to the worst electricity blackouts that it has yet experienced.

The government has not presented a credible way out of this electricity crisis.

In fact, there is a whole lot more evidence that the worst is still to come because the electricity utility that is supposed to be the plan is in constant chaos.

As if this is not enough, there is a constant stream of mass killings that are going unsolved.

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The mass shootings that keep on happening in Cape Town townships have been linked to a protection racket and extortion that police cannot seem to get on top of.

These protection schemes spring up because of the vacuum created by the lack of proper law enforcement.

It is the same vacuum that makes it possible for a minibus load of assassins to rock up at a Soweto tavern and kill 15 patrons.

Their brazenness points to the confidence that law enforcement will not find them.

And as pessimistic as it might sound, the president and the government need to be asked the question: is South Africa a country without a plan?