The President's empty promises

It's really ironic that South African President Thabo Mbeki positioned his latest State of the Nation address as the beginning of an era of hope. Pragmatically, rather than cynically, hope is about all the majority of the poor in South Africa have to cling to. One of my black staff built a tiny home in rural Pomeroy - an out of the way little area close to the battle site of Rorke's Drift in Kwazulu Natal. I drove him and his family down there for their Christmas holidays. Twelve years into the new democratic dispensation, in which the ANC elected promised potable water, some form of sewerage and certainly electricity to the poor of South Africa, they have none of the three. Let alone jobs or economic emancipation. They don't even have decent primary healthcare in the area. A case in point being a 28 year-old AIDS activist who recently died because he couldn't afford the 60km taxi journey to the nearest antiretroviral distribution point. Not that President Mbeki believes HIV causes AIDS of course, because he doesn't. I created irritation years ago by writing an article entitled, 'Make President Mbeki HIV positive.' My suggestion was that if he doesn't believe HIV is the causative agent in AIDS, then let him volunteer publicly to be infected with contaminated blood and we'll all watch his progress, The President's batty, Internet-derived dissident thesis that poverty is the chief catalyst in AIDS, flies in the face of the open secret that his own personal spokesperson Parks Mankahlana and one of his close firebrand associates, Peter Mokaba, died from AIDS. Yet both stuck to the presidential line that antiretrovirals are poisons which kill. The other shocker of course, was Mbeki being interviewed some time back and saying that he didn't know of anyone who'd died of AIDS. I'd invite him to go look at the Vosloorus cemetery on the East Rand of Johannesburg and note the endless mounds of freshly-closed graves. If the people are not dying of AIDS, then what is the epidemic that's killing millions of young South Africans? The number of funerals in that Vosloorus cemetery alone, at weekends, is so overloading infrastructure that literally in the middle of the funeral ceremony (I kid you not - I experienced it first hand) a loudly beeping front-end loader forces mourners aside and simply dumps the mound of soil next to the open grave onto the coffin. It then moves on to the next of at least a half dozen other funerals to do the same thing. Funeral corteges are warned at the gate that they have x number of minutes for their funeral so that the line of hearses and mourners outside the cemetery can 'have their turn'. I recently had to present a 'Scenario South Africa' overview to a group of French journalists. It was a thoroughly depressing exercise as I gathered information and worked through each social silo of education, health, electricity, water, sanitation, transport, law-enforcement (a sad oxymoron), communications, unemployment, corruption, politics and finally economics. On almost all fronts, the failure on the service-delivery front is bordering on the catastrophic. Infrastructure across the board (to whit, urban power and water cuts, utterly screwed-up billing systems and roads) is slowly but inexorably crumbling. The only thing functioning well if not downright brilliantly, despite all other factors, is the economy. It drags the rest of South Africa, kicking and screaming, to God knows where. For the poor and disadvantaged in the upcoming March 1st 2006 local elections, they'd better cling to the president's vision of hope. That's all they've ever had and all they'll continue to have and hold on to, if they continue to vote ANC and therefore service non-delivery, in the upcoming elections.