MAKHUDU SEFARA | Rudderless South Africa manufacturing fake monsters like Jeff Dahmer

Many of us yearn and sometimes plead for work — that antidote to an ignominious life of want. Yet we find work, according to economic theorist Adam Smith, essentially an “unpleasant activity”.

John Locke, 17th century philosopher, views work as a means of producing things, both tangible and intangible, that sustain life — such as policy, strategy or consumables. Georg Friedrich Hegel, meanwhile, says work is the very essence of man.

Many of our afflictions, though, are a consequence of nations such as ours not paying attention to people thrust into positions that require them to work but which people abhor the idea of work.

We elect you and leave you alone for five years. Only then do we have a conversation about whether you succeeded or not. Or we appoint you to an administrative position to only talk to you at the end of your term — if that end is not the end of your life. Scholars say genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong: they’re about people who don’t act, who sit idle or pretend to care when, in fact, they simply assuage and prolong our pain and suffering.

Well, let me be clear: this week, we had to deal with reporters traumatised by news coverage of the spine-chilling murder and dismemberment of Bokgabo Poo in Tamboville, Benoni. The four-year-old was raped and had her body cut to pieces, eyes gouged, allegedly by Ntokozo Zikhali. Which parents deserve to bury parts and pieces of their children?

Last week, the nation had to confront its beguiling relationship with sex workers after the discovery of their bodies at different stages of decomposition in Johannesburg’s inner city. Do we legalise the trade? Decriminalise? Or just let these underclasses suffer these macabre killings at the hands of sickly serial killers, until we eventually make up our minds? Or all of the above?

With each passing week, we are subjected to a horror movie. Parents and ordinary people intermittently call for the return of the death penalty because they’re at their wits’ end. It is as if we are recreating the SA version of the Netflix horror series titled Monster: the Jeff Dahmer Story!

What do we need? We need a minister, a commissioner and the entire criminal justice cluster telling us how they are going to deal with this epidemic, the murder mayhem, with available resources.

This is not the stuff journalists create — or should avoid — but a mirror they must hold back to society to show us what dysfunction does to us all. If this be the horrors we unleash on each other, we must put these on the table until someone does some work, that unpleasant activity, to rid us of the Dahmers of South Africa. After all, the Poo family deserve to know where the eyes of their four year old ended up. And whose family is next?

The important point is that we have all elected and appointed people to certain positions to serve us. In other words, to work! Smith told us work is unpleasant. So why do we appoint someone like police minister Bheki Cele and expect that he will simply do his part without pressure? Why do we have a hands-off approach to our safety?

The Sowetan asked on Wednesday, how many more kids must die? The missing line was “before Cele does his work” — the “unpleasant” but necessary thing, the thing that could keep more children alive, the thing that could keep our nation’s women free of the scourge of rape, the thing that could keep many of us safe in our houses and the streets of our nation. In Eldorado Park, families sleep at the local police station because of random killings after dusk.

If indeed “work” is the thing that sustains and is the very essence of man, when will we see the essence of Cele? In its absence, the horror keeps unfolding with each passing week.

What do we need? We need a minister, a commissioner and the entire criminal justice cluster telling us how they are going to deal with this epidemic, the murder mayhem, with available resources. Do a quarter of South Africans know what the strategy to keep our country safe is? Or if this strategy exists? What pillars does it have and how do each of these perform? Or, like that chilling Netflix horror story of Dahmer, are we waiting for a chance-break from rampant criminality?

If you think about this deeply, and acknowledge its importance, our crime situation and our poor response to it are just an aspect of life in our country. There are other areas where tragedies different from Bokgabo Poo’s are unfolding parallel to this.

Our biggest challenge as a country — a flailing economy that does not create jobs and thus condemns millions to lives of indignity — persists because those who are supposed to be hard at work evaluating the effectiveness of our strategies, the tactics deployed, and should be arguing for change where necessary, are simply tired because work is that unpleasant and exhausting. Or those who are supposed to be looking at the granularity of the challenge that is Eskom with a view to eliminate power outages are not working. Even those who are supposed to fire the CEO of Eskom, Andre De Ruyter, who is in the dark about our problems, are themselves in the dark too because they’re not pulling their lot.

We may all say during work interviews how hard we work, how self-motivated we are, how comfortable we are with pressure at odd hours when asked about work ethic. Yet the truth is if we are appointed and left to our own devices in environments without checks and monitoring, we would prove ourselves liars.

The challenges of crime, unemployment, dysfunctional transport networks, state-owned entities in ICU, municipalities that are falling apart and a national economy still in junk status point to a government that has been left alone without checks and balances. And because work is, per se, unpleasant, not much is being done. The killers of Poo become emboldened, our Joburg inner city produces fake Dahmers but monsters nonetheless, the unemployed wallow in indignity, the rich are terrified behind high walls, and what we are about, our true essence, remains unknown because those who should be lording over our country are sleeping at the wheel.

It doesn’t just rob us of our potential joy and development as a nation; it must force us into action before we too are forced to bury our children without their eyes.