The little things that make a difference

There are, possibly, two ways to deal with living in contemporary urban South Africa which, in many places, has been blighted by decay and neglect.

You can retreat to your suburban cocoon and ignore it, while whingeing on social media. Or you can, like East Rand businessman Luke Botha, say: No. We are tired of going backwards.

And you can put your sweat, or your money, or both, into cleaning up and beautifying the areas around you, especially those where you are have to work.

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That’s what Botha has done in and around the business park he bought. He has fixed the street, had road markings painted again and put in some speed humps. Then, he cleaned up a piece of vacant municipal land, which had been used as a dump, and turned it into a football field for residents of a nearby informal settlement.

It is the little things like these which can make a difference… which is the “broken windows” theory as it was applied to lift New York out of decades of crime and grime.

Fix up the environment, the theory goes, and you’ll encourage people to be better, too. Crime and littering will go down. Let’s hope Luke Botha’s experiment works