Zuma fiddles while SA begs

I don't know what finally pushed the man we knew only as Bra Selby to take his own life more than a week ago.

What I know is that the man, who must have been in his late 30s, had grown very desperate for a job in the last few months.

On most mornings, at a shopping centre in my neighbourhood where he eked out a living washing cars for local gym members, he would stop anyone he came across to ask if they had a job for him.

He lived in one of those sprawling informal settlements on Gauteng's East Rand, where the unemployment rate is said to be as high as 80%.

The money he made washing cars, he told me once, was not enough to feed his family, pay medical bills and send children to school.

Some days, he would make just enough to cover his taxi trip home and back.

Bra Selby's sad story epitomises the despair most poor and unemployed South Africans experience on a daily basis.

Desperate as his situation was, at least he still had some hope of finding employment. Many in his poverty-stricken neighbourhood - as in other poor communities around the country - have long given up.

And it is not just the "poorest of the poor" who are feeling the pinch in these tough economic times.

You need only look at your own finances and listen to your middle-class neighbours to see just how dire the situation is.

Rising water tariffs, higher petrol prices, increased electricity rates and, if you are in Gauteng, the introduction of e-tolling are all conspiring to make us poorer.

Forecasting the dark economic storm last year, Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan appealed to South Africans across the board to tighten their belts.

He followed that with a promise, during the budget speech earlier this year, that government departments would receive "haircuts" to help reduce sky-rocketing state spending.

"What we are saying is that all our cabinet members are ready for haircuts. If you want to deepen infrastructure then haircuts are necessary to reprioritise our finances," said Gordhan.

But it is difficult to take Gordhan's appeal for belt-tightening seriously and to believe his promises of austerity when the behaviour of some of the ruling party's most senior leaders suggests they are oblivious or insensitive to what the majority of the population is going through. If Sunday newspapers are anything to go by, our political leaders are not feeling the economic crunch.

For two weekends in a row the country's First Family has hogged front pages with pictures of them and their associates partying up a storm.

They are likely to do so once again at the weekend when President Jacob Zuma finally formalises his marriage to Bongi Ngema.

Don't get me wrong, I am all for celebrating birthdays. But, given the hardship brought about by the economic crisis, couldn't the Zumas have had a private and less elaborate 40th-birthday bash for Tobeka Madiba-Zuma, one of the president's wives?

Did Zuma's own 70th birthday celebrations, a week later, really have to continue for three days?

To me, it felt like they were rubbing the poor's noses in it.

And then there was the story of a R20-million buffalo. My forefathers were dispossessed of their land and forced to join the proletariat close to a century ago so I know very little about farming. But still, R20-million for a cow?

Again, there is nothing wrong with rich individuals such as Jaco Troskie, who bought the buffalo at an auction, and ANC businessman Cyril Ramaphosa - whose R19-million bid for the animal failed - spending their legitimately earned wealth in whatever way pleases them.

But you would have thought our nouveau riche, with their background in humanist struggles and acute awareness of endemic poverty in our country, would not be mimicking the conspicuous consumption of the old-order bourgeoisie.