JONATHAN JANSEN | Bit by bit, South Africans are becoming solutions for others

Two disturbing images haunt me this week. One, on Twitter, was that of a father saying goodbye to his son, wife and little girl as they passed through security at the airport to make their home in New Zealand. Smiling as they looked back, the father weighed his loss. At least the young family would be spared the horrors of what South Africa has become.  

Two days later a friend, a professor at the University of Johannesburg, was returning with his wife to Cape Town airport after visiting their children here in the south of the country. The major roadway to the airport was closed due to some or other crisis, so my friend relied on his GPS to get him through the relatively unfamiliar roads of the Cape. The GPS guided him through Gugulethu. He had hardly entered the old township when a massive rock came through the window on the passenger side, causing serious brain damage to his wife of 50 years. She was rushed to ICU and on Tuesday died of horrific injuries. 

Last Friday I was teaching with this dear colleague, preparing top young academics from across the country to become professors. When I called him shortly after his wife passed away, this man who had devoted so much of his life to education and development in the country was overcome with grief at the loss of his beloved spouse.

I wish I could be more positive, but we are once at a crossroads.

It has come down to this. Do you leave the country for the relative safety of other climes or do you risk being murdered for a cellphone because of a wrong turn-off to the airport? This is the real transition from apartheid, one of the wisest academicians in the country told me as we reflected on the tragic death. Until now, he said, we have been held together not by the government, but by the goodwill of thousands of South Africans, like the UJ professor, who try so hard to improve the lives of others.  

That’s right, not by the government. When you hear the minister of basic education announce that her department will eliminate pit latrine toilets by 2025, understand that she is lying again; that promise has been made often, deadlines missed, and come 2025, she is likely to not be around. Worse, why 2025 when the problem can so easily be solved this year by mobilising public and private resources to prioritise this action. The knee-jerk announcement was only made because again, earlier this month, a four-year-old child died in a pit toilet at a primary school in Glen Grey in the Eastern Cape. Even such a horrendous death of our most treasured gift, a child in a shithole in the ground, cannot move these moral midgets to do the right thing. 

Those who have options are paying attention. The slaughter of Bosasa liquidator Cloete Murray and his son Thomas at an off-ramp in Midrand is being processed very carefully by the mobile middle classes. More and more young people whom I teach and mentor are seriously contemplating leaving the country with their degrees and skills. To put it bluntly, I have a sense that we are preparing high-level human capital for the export market. 

The calculations young people make are simple and realistic. You have one life. In an instant, the violence engulfing the country can take it away or leave you or a member of your family maimed and traumatised for the rest of your life. It is definitely not worth it. 

I wish I could be more positive, but we are again at a crossroads. Instead of calling time out on the crisis, our political parties revel in voting mayors and other officials in and out of power, oblivious to the suffering of our people as the earth, quite literally, swallows up properties in parts of the country. Headlines are about a serious criminal who escapes from prison to live a life of luxury while evading capture; the man is now a celebrity on the front pages of newspapers, a valuable distraction from the miserable lives people lead here.

We can pretend no more, for there are two serious consequences for development in South Africa when the most talented and educated youth leave. First, we will be left largely with corrupt and connected cadre deployees who are given jobs for which they have little to no skills. Second, we will be left with even more hollowed-out public institutions and nothing else but to turn on each other simply to survive.