Wednesday, 7 October 2020

The Powderkeg

Once again the political situation in South Africa has forced me to dust off my opinions about the state of affairs in our troubled country. Since my last post things have, astoundingly, gotten even worse. Whereas in my previous post I likened the ruling party to a group of chimpanzees playing with hand grenades, I fear the situation is more dire than that. The entire country is a room full of stored powderkegs and the ruling party is like a man groping in the dark in that room burning match after match with no concern for his surroundings to try and find his way out. Eventually there will be a rather large and impressive explosion.

The ruling party's inability to do anything about farm murders, or just their complete indifference about it, has already caused major problems in one of the provinces of our beloved country. Their willingness to turn a blind eye to blatant corruption, while constantly saying "Yah, we'll get to it." has caused thousands of workers to go on strike in an attempt to speed up the process. Before writing this post I decided to look up the meaning of the word politics. It is defined as the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations between individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. The ruling party got stuck on the "distribution of resources" part and thought to themselves "Ah, this means we get all the resources" without realising, or caring, that the country requires some as well.

If our political landscape is like a classroom, the ANC is the shifty kid that steals your pencil and lunch money when you aren't looking, the DA is the kid who tattles on everything that everyone else is doing wrong without doing anything further about it themselves, the EFF is the class bully that just causes chaos and disruption and the rest of the political parties are just there, not really having any impact.

I fear for the future of our country. The phrase "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" has never applied so perfectly. Because of the rampant corruption in government, and the fact that it is causing more and more job losses, the crime levels are sky high. People are resorting to progressively violent means, just to get an income. And the victims of those crimes are getting fed up with it and taking the law into their own hands. In essence, we've gone back to the middle ages. The ruling class sit upon their thrones, safely ensconced in their castles while peasants wage war on each other just to survive. But, as the middle ages have demonstrated time and again, there will come a time where the peasants will unite and the king will lose his head....