South Africa is not poor, just poorly managed

South Africa is not a poor country, it is just very poorly managed and led.

The disastrous socioeconomic policies, coupled to strict economic marginalisation, have created a country where the gap between rich and poor is growing.

And people must not be misled: this is not as the government would have us believe because of the whites, coloureds, and Indians, but because of the greed by our ruling elite.

We are constantly told that crime doesn’t pay, yet many of our leaders pay themselves “extras” through crime. The R1.5 trillion(!) they have stolen is unbelievable.

There is no greater dishonesty than blaming someone else for one’s mistakes, mismanagement, criminal tendencies, lack of leadership and pure incompetence.

Using their ill-gotten gains, some of our leaders have built themselves palaces of Versailles, equipped with the latest
mod cons.

They dine in the very best restaurants.

While they wallow in the lap of luxury, the misled voters grovel in the dirt and mud, treading carefully as they make their way through devastated and filthy CBDs and streets overflowing with raw sewage.

Dressed in their designer outfits, our leaders look down on us with arrogance and entitlement from the back seats of their fancy chauffeur-driven cars.

The government has created its own ticking time bomb. It has facilitated the establishment of its own “bourgeoisie” and “peasant” classes.

Our bourgeoisie even has its own private army consisting of uniformed thugs, many who pose as “MK war veterans” but have never heard a shot fired in anger.

Our bourgeoisie is the ruling elite and they are distinguished by their arrogance, and entitlement – and their extreme wealth – much of it the rewards of corruption and embezzlement.

Anyone who dares question their sudden accumulation of wealth, their honesty and integrity, or even their litany of failures, is branded a “counterrevolutionary” at best.

At worst, they are “racist threats to the state”.

But history has a strange way of repeating itself. There are many parallels between what happened in France in 1789 and the dark abyss our current political and socioeconomic trajectories are taking us.

Known as the French Revolution, it was a time when the peasants rose up against the bourgeoisie. The peasants had simply had enough.

And it didn’t end well for the ruling classes. The underlying causes of the French Revolution are generally viewed as resultant from the failure of the ruling elite to manage social and economic inequality.

Rapid population growth and the inability to adequately finance government debt resulted in economic depression, high food prices coupled to a reduction in wages, unemployment, popular frustration, and increased poverty.

Combined with an unfair system of taxation, along with resistance to reform by the ruling elite, it resulted in a crisis Louis XVI proved unable to manage.

Despite the obvious dangers it was allowing to happen, the ruling elite did little to correct anything as they believed they were entitled to their positions of power and wealth.

Notwithstanding the very obvious social distress increasing almost daily, no-one took notice of the potential dangers that were simmering in the pot of discontent.

When it erupted, the French Revolution was not a pretty time to find oneself in, especially if one was part of the bourgeoisie.

The uprising of the angry and frustrated peasants brought about anarchy, chaos and violence.

Fast-forward the clock to South Africa in 2021 where anarchy and chaos is festering. The rule by our arrogant and entitled bourgeoisie borders on a form of dictatorial tyranny.

Their word is law. Criticism is not tolerated, despite it being long-overdue and valid. They indulge in self-serving corruption and other illegal enrichment practises they define as “work”.

Their constant failures are placed before the door of apartheid and state capture.

The working classes, along with many voters, are sick and tired of the purposeful distress the political classes are creating and exploiting for own gain.

They are flexing their muscles. Our political leaders have chosen to walk a rocky road in their glass slippers – a road that, unless government drastically and positively intervenes, could give rise to our very own French revolution.

– Mashaba is a political advisor