PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA - AUGUST 07: Members of Not In My Name SA Movement protest in solidarity with Zimbabweans at the Zimbabwean Embassy on August 07, 2020 in Pretoria, South Africa. It is reported that the group protested against the alleged human rights violations taking place in Zimbabwe. The country is facing challenges with the decaying economy, the health system has collapsed and the unemployment rate is alarming. (Photo by Gallo Images/Lefty Shivambu)
Reading the letter from Zimbabwe from Cathy Buckle in our paper today, there will be those who shake their heads about the collapse of a once-thriving country and will mutter something about South Africa heading in that same direction.
But, wait. Read it again.
For you will see that, in many respects, our country is already there. There are already many people selling things from makeshift spaza shops on our streets.
There are already gridlocked traffic jams at intersections where the traffic lights don’t work – and where volunteers (often homeless people in the case of Johannesburg) step in and impose order on the vehicular chaos.
We, as South Africans, are already filling the gaps left by our failed electricity network – whether through solar power or other alternatives.
Many of us are also looking to the future and sinking boreholes to provide our households with water. We are already a failed state – if you define a failed state as a place where citizens have to take care of themselves because their government cannot do what it should be doing.
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And, while we in South Africa may not be as far down the road of collapse as our neighbours to the north, more and more services are not being delivered by the state.
And, as more and more citizens fall “off the grid”, either through design or circumstance, we are going to start seeing negative spin-offs which will tighten the spiral of decline – like the decline in tax revenue, which will parallel the mushrooming informal sector.
The positive of this is, looking at things north of our border, that people on this continent are both resourceful and resilient and that they can survive despite what their politicians do to them. The negative is that a country goes from a developing nation to a deteriorating one.
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