Don’t sugar coat it, South Africa is a broken country

This week I had to drive to a little town in Limpopo for work.

The poverty I saw on the road was heartbreaking. The state of the roads was shocking.

I love South Africa and it’s people, but there is no more space for sugar-coating the facts: we are a broken country.

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I have spoken to regional leaders of several parties, as well as civil groups and ordinary citizens, and the message was unmistakable: We all want the same things.

We want a country that works, we want to get rid of the inequality in our country so that we all can prosper, we want to sanitise South Africa of corruption.

We all want a good education for our children. We want jobs for those educated offspring.

And hopeless romantics such as myself want love and happiness and health, but that goes without saying.

We have an opportunity to have a say in the rebuilding of our beloved South Africa this year when election time comes.

At this stage, I have no idea which party I’ll trust with my vote and I think a lot of my readers have the same dilemma.

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I can’t see a party that can cure South Africa but, at the same time, I can’t see how it can be done without the buy-in and involvement of every prominent political entity, every NPO, the private sector… in a nutshell: every citizen.

It takes a village to raise a child. But it takes a nation to fix a country.

Last weekend, little Egg and I expanded our training schedule to include a parkrun – those great weekly mass exercise events spread all across the country.

She loved being in a park, she loved the palpable goodwill of the other participants and she adored the many dogs who completed the route with their owners.

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That afternoon, I overheard her explaining to her grandmother how parkruns work.

“You drive to the event. Then you park your car. And then you run. That’s why they call it a parkrun,” she said.

“But you don’t have to run if you don’t want to. You can even walk. Just as long as you do the route.”

Dear reader, this year we have to begin the long, painful road to recovery for our wonderful country. We can run or we can walk. Just as long as we do it.