It’s a fight to the finish

It is the evening of 23 March 2020 and President Cyril Ramaphosa has just left the nation stunned with his announcement the country would be going into lockdown as of 26 March.

What was lockdown? What was coronavirus? What did it all mean?

Businesses, including us, scrambled to put systems in place and IT administrators fought to make them, and hardware, available.

Companies had to open firewalls meant to protect office equipment from the other viruses and in a matter of days, living offices were turned into expensive air-conditioned ghost towns.

So many of the regulations were utterly senseless. Curfews, fathers not allowed to visit their newborn children, lockdown after lockdown and, while we watched, what was left of the economy went into a nosedive.

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Unemployment rocketed; people died by the thousands – the last estimate more than 300 000 people, depending on how you work the number out. Not that it matters, each number is still a loved one.

Local Covid regulations were repealed in June 2022, and it was only in May this year that the World Health Organisation declared Covid was no longer a public health emergency of international concern.

Of course, there was the half-a-billion-rand corruption under No-More-Corruption-Ramaphosa, however, under all of it, there was a tiny voice that believed this was the time for change to the old-world order.

We were to find the humanity in each other, put our differences aside and work toward a common betterment of humankind.

Well, that crashed and burned harder than our toy rand. The world is at war.

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Leaders of countries “condemn” and tut-tut piously at the rivers of blood flowing in the Middle East, Ukraine and Africa saying, “We must do something” while checking their bank balances.

Because, let us not be fooled, war is a great way to boost the ol’ bottom line.

We fight for an ideal; we fight to protect our way of life; we fight to protect our loved ones; we fight; we fight… we fight.

Ever since we’ve crawled out of the sludge, we have fought.

And the current government, which has set itself up as the controller of all, is not fighting for us.

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It will tut-tut on our behalf at foreign nations as it skips delicately over a 32%-odd unemployment rate, trying to divert attention with a pithy percentile drop in the unemployed.

The world is at war and while governments fight for our ideals and way of life, people fight for food and water; for a place to shelter; to escape other people’s ways of life and ideals.

People are slaughtered wholesale in conflicts around the world and not one “leader” will raise a hand and say, “How can we meet halfway?”

Politicians with fat wallets drive with protection details to keep them safe from the people they fleece… sorry… serve.

They fly on the public purse to engage futilely at the United Nations of Things to vote – or not – for other things that have no effect on the guy standing next to the robot just wanting a job, not money, not food.

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And somehow, we grind on. We keep on keeping on; we keep the faith; we keep the hope.

Change has to happen.

And nobody is going to do it for you.

Happy New Year…