Parliament fire: A most grim sign of the times

One valuable lesson that the Covid pandemic has taught the world is that change is not only inevitable, it can happen at a pace totally beyond the grasp of the ordinary human mind.

The world is yet to come to terms with the devastation and havoc that the pandemic has caused in little under two years. It has caused centuries-old cultural practices to be set aside in favour of the new normal.

Sadly, for South Africa it has exposed its rather soft underbelly. The already crumbling passenger rail system is a case in point. Societal frustrations with inequalities needed the smallest of sparks to spill onto the streets in deadly fashion in July 2020.

Schools were burned down so regularly during the first hard lockdown that it ceased to shock people. And this past w weekend, parts of parliament burned down.

Also Read: WATCH: Parliament on fire, several buildings under threat

There are many reasons a lot of people would want the building that houses South Africa’s lawmakers to burn down. Some would want it to burn down because they consider it a “useless” instrument for governing South Africa.

To others, it is a relic of apartheid, where laws that kept apartheid in business were promulgated.

Yet others would want to burn it down in the short-sighted view that they would benefit from any government tender towards rebuilding it.

Or it could be a small oversight that led to the mistake of burning the actual hose down.

Whatever the reasons, it is incomprehensible that the conditions for a plot to burn parliament down could have been allowed to have happened.

The Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (Prasa) and the department of transport worked so hard during the hard lockdown to ensure that they looked the other way when organised criminals literally stole thousands of kilometres of railway steel by cutting it up.

Also Read: It will take nothing short of a miracle to fix Prasa

Prasa looked away so much that when the criminals were done stealing rail, they went on to strip away anything metallic at some of the countries busiest train stations, leaving them bare.

That this could happen, that thieves could steal the whole country’s passenger rail system, was not an indication that something was wrong at Prasa, but rather confirmation of a systemic failure in governance.

The government had allowed things to fail so badly that it became possible to wake up one day to find that parliament had been stolen. Well, this time it was not stolen but burnt down – whether deliberately or by some electrical fault makes no difference.

Also Read: Be grateful one city works, says Ramaphosa in Parliament fire address

Parliament is a national key point and as such there are multiple levels of security that are designed to safeguard it against human invasion or damage or accidental fires.

That a fire could start in the old National Assembly and spread as it did to parts of the current National Assembly without being detected by either guards or digital systems, points to the same kind of systemic failure that allowed the national rail transport system to be stolen in broad daylight.

This year has started with the grimmest of reminders that although a lot of things work in government, there are crucial systems and processes that have been allowed to stop working.