A VIEW OF THE WEEK: Which side is really running SA?

There is a tale from the early days of American railroads where a company decided to undercut its competition by building tracks parallel to theirs, offering passengers cheaper fares until all the people who used to ride on the competition’s trains used theirs instead. Bankrupt, the competition agreed to sell themselves to the company.

Centuries later, a similar story is happening in service delivery on the other end of the world.

It has been obvious for some time that the “new dawn” we were promised by President Cyril Ramaphosa six years ago was just him swapping our watches to make us think daylight was coming when, in reality, it was still midnight.

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Not wanting to upset the party that put him into power, he has been slow and sometimes non-existent in dealing with problems.

His solution has been to create parallel offices inside his own to deal with important issues, and structures to do the work of dysfunctional ministries.

While it was probably the best solution for non-confrontational leadership, it left the whole system confused and weak. Not that Ramaphosa is worried too much about that when he sees his retirement coming with the dawn.

So to deal with the issue of a weakened and often ineffective government, citizens have created their own parallel structures to fix problems.

‘I’ll do it myself’

To deal with crime, they have invested in private security that is sometimes so effective even the cops call on them instead. Our private medical care is among the best in the world, and is being piggybacked on for the National Health Insurance Bill. Both of these are used by the politicians who are supposed to be in charge of the government’s duty to keep us safe and healthy.

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Our electricity crisis has crippled the country. But the biggest reason load shedding has been reduced in the last few weeks has not been because of endless hours of hard work by the government, but because of a large private investment in solar by citizens and businesses who need to keep the lights on.

And their project is getting even bigger, with “parallel municipalities” run by citizens in small towns doing the work that local government should handle. The only thing stopping them from annexing the whole town is bylaws and the constitution.

The most unequal country in the world is becoming more unequal

Nearly 30 years into democracy, the Herculean task of narrowing the wealth, services and resources gap in the most unequal country in the world has failed.

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Those in power appear to have given up and outsourced their work to private citizens and businesses, while they sit back for the ride.

While doing this, they leave those who have always been unable to afford the private alternatives to languish, not much better off than they were shortly after democracy – except maybe for a new tap.