The wailing last week in Nhlungwane, north of Durban, as a crowd gathered at the edge of a stream to mourn the people swept up by the floods in KwaZulu-Natal is a stark contrast to the mass ululation of jubilant South Africans celebrating the victory of the liberation struggle, almost to the day on April 27 1994.
“As you are standing here, you smell the bad smell. It’s painful. People are crying everywhere, people are dying because of our sins,” prophetess Nonhlanhla Mlaba told the mourners.
While the prophetess may have intoned personal sin, the biblical reference of the things a father does wrong becoming the burden of his children is inescapable. One can certainly draw parallels to present-day SA where government’s actions — and inertia in many spheres — are to blame for the suffering of the vast majority of our people.
The hope, euphoria and fervent belief in a better life for all in 1994 have been replaced by despair, anguish and the cold, harsh reality of a dream deferred.
The celebration of Freedom Day, 28 years after millions of South Africans voted for change, rings hollow as we face unprecedented levels of poverty, unemployment, service delivery failure and wide-scale looting of our country’s coffers by political elites.
Our government has failed to remove the shackles of inequality, allowing the gap between the rich and the poor to become an ever-widening chasm as poverty-related crime and disease devastate the most vulnerable in our nation.
Our government has failed to remove the shackles of inequality, allowing the gap between the rich and the poor to become an ever-widening chasm as poverty-related crime and disease devastate the most vulnerable in our nation.
Ask the people of Nhlungwane, who build their informal homes on tenuous slopes close to a river because they need access to water; or the people of Klawer who were dispersed by stun grenades for protesting outside the magistrate’s court where Daniel Smit was being tried for the heinous death of 13-year-old Jerobejin van Wyk; or the thousands of patients at the overrun Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital on the brink of breakdown about their experience of a better life under democracy.
They will argue that Freedom Day is a mockery because their lives have not changed much or become freer since 1994.
They will argue that politicians, who are supposed to be the champions of the people, serve only to enrich themselves.
The farcical scenes that played out at the joint sitting of the national council of provinces and the national assembly on the eve for Freedom Day, as MPs hurled insults at KwaZulu-Natal premier Sihle Zikalala over the recent water tanker scandal, underscores that view.
Zikalala’s flip-flop over his role in the saga and the resultant grandstanding by leaders in the house. during what was supposed to be a briefing on government’s response to the national tragedy, reveal everything that is wrong with our leadership.
And yet their power goes unchecked.
President Cyril Ramaphosa’s address at the Freedom Day commemoration at the Kees Taljaard Stadium in Mpumalanga on Wednesday, under the theme “consolidate our democratic gains”, with his tick box of deliverables, is cold comfort to the majority of our people.
His speech was poetic and stirred up patriotism, but words without action are just that.
Freedom means we have the opportunity to be something we never thought we could be. Leadership owes it to the forefathers of democracy and to the people of SA to foster an environment where economic and social freedom can thrive and flourish. Our people deserve this.
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