WATCH: TikTok musician’s new song beautifully encapsulates dysfunction in SA

TikTok musician Dan Vee correctly asks, “Oh dear, South Africa, what is going on?” in the first line of his sombre song. The beat, while casual, is juxtaposed with the lyrics of that song.

Dan Vee, who only released a shortened version of the song, beautifully encapsulates what it feels like to live in daily dysfunction and disarray. “What the hell is going on?” he asks.

Watch Dan Vee’s song here:

@danvee Dear ????????! Let me know in the comments if you want a full version of this!#danvee #eskom #loadshedding #prayforsa ♬ Dear South Africa – Dan Vee

The South African experience

If we can’t grow, we’re dying

Every day, we’re either short of power or water, sometimes both, and we have to commute on collapsing infrastructure.

Every day, we risk damaging our vehicles because we are navigating large volumes of vehicle traffic and short tempers, chancers (those who don’t know how a four-way stop works in load shedding) and the road mafia (aka taxis who don’t live or drive by the same rules).

Then there’s a plethora of potholes, forcing drivers to veer onto oncoming traffic to avoid falling into a crater, which is now seemingly normalised.

It’s now a common sight to see drivers changing tyres on the roadside because no one is maintaining the roads that are supposed to be repaired and maintained by our taxes and fuel levies.

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Where are the traffic officers?

At this point in our troubled, dysfunctional ecosystem, I would wager that Johannesburg Metro Police Department (JMPD) officers are akin to the hyena.

Groups of scavengers sitting behind traffic cameras while entire suburbs are out of power and require desperate assistance directing traffic.

If citizens are prey for government to carry out its daily state-sanctioned abuse, then JMPD is our secondary abusers.

They have chosen to ignore a large part of their mandate, traffic control, in favour of increasing revenue.

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Speed cameras are once again operating in Johannesburg, and metro police are out in full force, trapping motorists at points in their journeys when they can gain some momentum after being stuck and delayed at multiple congested robots.

It’s obscene! They call it revenue generation; I call it having the privilege of ignoring your mandate and getting paid because you police traffic in a mafia state with zero accountability.

Then when the beggars take up the job of directing traffic, motorists are warned that these are not trained officials and that it’s not their job.

This brings me to the spike in beggars; children rented out daily to garner sympathy from motorists.

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Where is the social development department in all this? Why has this been allowed to continue unabated? Small children playing in the unforgiving African sun, and rain, who don’t even know they were rented out for the day.

JMPD doesn’t need to maintain road safety at congested robots because the city’s coalition government is too busy gouging each other’s eyes out at council meetings. The people that were elected to root out the ANC cannot put their differences aside long enough to govern.

I daresay Joburg under the ANC is an evil we know and can handle; the multi-party coalition is the devil we didn’t know but has been exposed as power-hungry opportunists with zero intention to improve South Africa.

Things are not just bad for the average South African, and we’re stuck in a rut where we work every day only to survive.

My partner sometimes hopelessly tells me, “If we can’t grow, we’re dying”. Indeed, we are not surviving; we wake up just to die a little more each day.