South Africans are paying the costs of political infighting for little return

Looks like that house and car you’re paying off just got a bit more expensive and will likely get more expensive yet again soon.

But not to worry, our president returns from the UK to fight others in his party to keep his place while our official opposition is no-confidencing their own people. Not the Joburg ones… those ones seem okay; they’re taking on the ones in their own Western Cape castle.

Oh and the EFF is dancing on Hani’s grave, while Twitter is ablaze with newly minted lawyers with no legal background being critical of the parole system.

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All that is going to make paying off your house and car more expensive.

When Mkhize criticised the prez for being out of touch, he may have had a point. Not that Mkhize has been touching anybody of late. But that’s their fight and you know what … it’s not going to make my house and car any cheaper.

The whole system appears to be out of touch. Frankly, I couldn’t give a damn whether my president Mbekis himself on the floor of my living room. I just want to see things getting done.

So far, it seems that all the political energy of the country is being expended on the politricking of the country.

Other than getting lockdown undone, I can’t seem to put a finger on anything that’s really gotten done this year. Yay, a couple of arrests and woohoo for uhmm, let me think of something … errr, oh yeah the completion of the Zondo report.

That’s all very nice but still the things which matter seem to be slipping up. These are important things, no doubt. They are just not the exclusively important things.

A dude convicted of murder out for parole deserves our attention, certainly. Does the attention it deserves deserve to blind us from everything else happening around us?

Na! I’m not sure why the South African psyche believes it is important to only consider one thing at a time. It has resulted in being able to apply a second thing just to argue against the one thing at a time.

You know the drill: you start complaining about the tyre you burst in Winnie Mandela Road and say that things must be done about the potholes only to be met with “but people are starving” as if it’s a put down.

Weirdly, after all that, the pothole still exists and those same people are starving. But the argument clearly had one winner. That’s what matters, isn’t it?

This is why it’s hardly a surprise that so little works here anymore. It’s not important that Eskom functions when we have more important things to deal with, like who runs the ANC. It’s not important how clean the water in the taps is when we’re dealing with who the Speaker of the Western Cape is.

How important is it that the army has no money when Hani’s killer is out on parole? We like to brag about our complex legal system and our progressive constitution but in order to use it, we need to be able to deal with complexities and, somehow, we really can’t. Maybe we can but we certainly can’t seem to.

It’s pretty frustrating that we find ourselves paying the costs of political infighting for little return. The return is mostly in the hands of the people we’re paying to run the country so it would be marvellous if they could sway some attention to that.

Sure, that’s wishful thinking but 20 years ago, so were South African class action suits. Perhaps now is the time, that as a class of citizens, we use this complex legal system to force some people into actually doing something other than fighting among themselves.

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