There are three names that will one day tell us something about the way we live now. They are not the names of powerful or influential men or women; they are not the names of the rich and the famous.

They are just good men and women. Ordinary people. They work. They live. They try to raise their children and live within the law.

They are all now dead. Olga Kekana and Andries Tatane were this week joined by a nurse, a mother who had returned from her work in the UK to help her son get into university. Remember her name: Gloria Sekwena.

Olga Kekana. Andries Tatane. Gloria Sekwena. These names tell you, more than anything else, what a broken people we are. They remind you that our government, our country, is becoming a playground of the "big man" and has nothing to do with the human being, the person, the ordinary man and woman.

It is important to remember what bar we set ourselves in 1994 when we all came together after decades of apartheid and centuries of colonialism. Nelson Mandela, the first president of our democratic republic, ushered in our new country by saying: "We must, constrained by, and yet regardless of, the accumulated effect of our historical burdens seize the time to define for ourselves what we want to make of our shared destiny.

"The government I have the honour to lead, and I dare say the masses who elected us to serve in this role, are inspired by the single vision of creating a people-centred society."

Underline those words: "a people-centred society". What do they mean? What do we see when we take the cases of Kekana, Tatane and Sekwena and put them under the microscope?

In October 2009, the young Olga Kekana was going out for the night with three friends in Mabopane, north of Pretoria. She was shot through the head when the car she was travelling in with the three friends was "mistaken" by police for hijackers.

The survivors say that the police started shooting immediately they flashed their blue lights. There was no warning. Eight policemen opened fire with R5s and 9mm pistols. The car had 13 bullet holes. The police fled the scene instantly and did not help the injured.

In the months preceding the murder of Kekana, police top brass had on numerous occasions called on the police to "shoot to kill" suspected criminals. These reckless utterances killed Kekana. The "small person", Kekana, is now dead, cut down in the prime of her life. The "big people", who call for basic laws to be flouted in pursuit of pyrrhic victories over crime, enjoy fat salaries.

Andries Tatane was a mathematics teacher, a community activist and publisher of a community newspaper. In April he joined 4000 community members in Ficksburg in the Free State to march on the local municipality.

The community had had enough of poor service delivery. They marched, peacefully, but were repelled with water cannon by police.

Tatane was a man of conscience. When he noticed police harassing one of the marchers, an old man, he tried to intervene. The police turned their wrath on him: at least 12 of them beat him with batons, kicked him and shot rubber bullets into his chest at close range. He died.

This week Gloria Sekwena returned from her job as a nurse in London and joined her son, Kgositsile, in the queues at the University of Johannesburg to try to register.

Students started arriving at the university on Sunday night last week hoping to be first in line when registration started the next day.

Sekwena was queuing with her son when a stampede erupted and she was crushed in the melee. She died.

How did we get here, to where a mother has to die for her child to get into a university? How can the University of Johannesburg, the Department of Higher Education and our government allow a situation in which people die queuing for a place to study?

Ironically, one of the key clauses of the Freedom Charter reads: "The doors of learning and of culture shall be opened!"

Gloria Sekwena died so her child could get an education. Is this what we protested, fought and died for?

Andries Tatane died standing up for his community; to get the services it deserved. Is this what we fought for - a police state?

Olga Kekana died doing what young people do everywhere - going out for a night on the town. Did we fight so that every young black driving a car could become an automatic suspect - to be shot and killed on sight?

No political, government or university leader has fallen on his sword for these travesties, or others. It has become okay, here, today, for ordinary people to die to get their children into university.