JUSTICE MALALA | No water, load-shedding, no service delivery — one common denominator

Three weeks ago, I called my mother and told her I was on my way to visit her in Hammanskraal, just north of Tshwane. Hammanskraal is famous. The late great Dr Nthato Motlana is from there. Herman Mashaba, the political leader and millionaire businessman, is from the area. It is also notorious for its dirty water (a few months ago at least 31 people had died from the cholera outbreak in the area). I grew up next to a village called Stinkwater.

My mother asked me to pop into the shopping mall near her and pick up some groceries. Hammanskraal has many malls these days but no factories — the Babelegi Industrial Complex, which employed thousands of people, died in the 1990s with the advent of democracy.

I went to the first Spar outlet. Nearby, I saw long queues of people. The queues snaked around the mall. It was old people, many of them women, sitting on the ground or lying down. Some were with children. I asked what they were waiting for. Turns out, some of them had been waiting for several days in the queue. They were waiting for their pensions at the post office.

It was the sixth of September, the place was packed, and they did not believe that they would get their pensions that day.

I went to the supermarket. It was packed. I asked one of the staffers why it was so full. “Some of the pensioners have only now received their pensions, so they are shopping,” he said. “They have been waiting for days. Some did not have money to go back home.”

I asked him for a big trolley as I had to buy some big staples — mielie meal, rice, cooking oil, that sort of thing — for my mother. “We don’t have any trolleys left. Head office says we will get 200 next week,” he said.

I could not understand. How could they lose 200 trolleys? “People steal them because they are very useful if you live in an area that has no water. You can place two 25-litre water containers in a big Spar trolley like this and push it home from the water tanker. So our trolleys have all been stolen and are used all over the villages as water transport.”

You can place two 25-litre water containers in a big Spar trolley like this and push it home from the water tanker. So our trolleys have all been stolen and are used all over the villages as water transport.

—  Hammanskraal SuperSpar staffer

The employee was resourceful. He said one of their merchandisers had a trolley ‘hidden away’ for use in her work. He would get her to lend it to me. So on September 6 2023, I was the only person in a packed SuperSpar in Hammanskraal with a large trolley. I paid for my shopping and headed out the door. The security guard stopped me.

“You can’t take that to the car park. You need a trolley marshal,” he said. A trolley marshal was located, and he escorted me to the car park to ensure this piece of plastic is not stolen. They even had a name for the man: a trolley marshal.

The press is littered with dire predictions of the imminent collapse of this country made by international financiers, economists, political analysts, fund managers, businesspeople and newspaper columnists about South Africa. The volume of these predictions is so huge that sometimes one must leave one’s office and walk the country and experience what ordinary folk are going through.

There are days when this country is beautiful, amazing, incredible. When you realise just what strong institutions we have. When you realise that we have great human beings and civil servants like Babita Deokaran and others. But in the real world, the world of the poor people of Hammanskraal, it is an insult to talk about a silver lining. Here, life is brutal. Crime is rampant. Corruption is rife. Service delivery is non-existent. Load-shedding is constant. One youngster I spoke to told me that his neighbourhood had not had water for three weeks. You hear that story every day from people in Diepsloot and Alexandra and many other parts of that country. Now you experience it at a personal level in the “rich” suburbs. Several times in the past three weeks, I had no water in Rosebank, Johannesburg, possibly the second-richest square mile in Africa. Plus eleven hours without electricity. And the country is broke.

Why is South Africa failing so spectacularly? This week's Sunday Times front page story, which details how Joburg’s mayoral committee member for economic development, Nomoya Mnisi, has appointed a tollgate cashier, a receptionist and a person with a grade 11 to the board of the Johannesburg Property Company, gives you the answer. These board appointees are from her branch of the ANC.

Start with the “glitches” at the Postbank that led to thousands of pensioners going hungry this past month, then go through why there is no water in Hammanskraal, why there are hundreds of hijacked government buildings in Joburg, and every single time you will find that it is linked to the ANC’s corruption and cadre deployment.

Take a walk outside, among the people. South Africa needs a change in 2024.