Sport could teach the political bozos who run this country a thing or two when it comes to applying rules and even changing them.
The rules of sports are applied rigidly when they’re in force, but they’re also fluid, being updated to improve the game or benefit the health of players.
Rugby is forever tinkering with its laws, and an obvious one was aimed at improving protection of front-rowers from neck injuries in the scrum.
If only they would revise the rules to make rugby union a bit more flowing and less like league, but maybe that’s the price of professionalism.
Boxing tried to address deaths in the ring by putting in an extra fourth strand of rope to lessen the whip effect of a felled boxer’s head hitting the bottom rope and then slamming into the canvas.
The World Boxing Council claimed that health was the main factor for it changing the duration of title bouts from 15 rounds to 12, though the real motivation was to accommodate TV by fitting a full fight into a one-hour slot.
Football took long enough before putting its foot down on melodramatic dives aimed at winning penalties, though only after it had become part of Neymar’s DNA.
Cricket dreamed up T20 to give fans a format that was faster and more exciting than the 50-over and five-day matches, though I don’t think there’s anything more exciting than a Test that goes down to the wire.
And so the list goes on.
Yet, when it comes to normal life, why are we so slack in this country at, first, applying certain rules, and not changing others?
The rules need to be determined by the public, who should also decide matters like whether civil servants and public institutions deserve increases.
For example, on two consecutive days driving back to Johannesburg from the Indoor Hockey World Cup in Pretoria this week I encountered vehicles travelling in the wrong direction on the highway.
Not a traffic cop in sight.
I don’t count the JMPD, the so-called Johannesburg metro cops, as traffic officers since I’ve never seen them assisting traffic to flow, like doing points duty at broken robots. Instead they set up roadblocks and speed traps on open stretches just after kilometres of potholed roads, out-of-order lights and backed-up traffic.
There is the Gauteng traffic department, but the only time I’ve seen them in the past several months, if not years, happened to be on Monday, while driving to Pretoria.
They swung into an intersection, which actually had a working robot that had just turned green for me, to hold us up so a blue-light gang starring some parasitic politician could shoot through towards their next appointment.
In a country where eroding services have increased frustration for the general populace, the top brass have no sensitivity and it’s clear they’re not going to spark the change that’s needed.
The rules need to be determined by the public, who should also decide matters like whether civil servants and public institutions deserve increases.
MPs or city councillors want a raise? Get a public mandate — don’t let them decide it.
Eskom wants to increase tariffs? Take it from the salary increases that would have gone to every member of its bloated management. Throw in all responsible cabinet ministers too. They can get their next increase in 2038, when the power crisis is sorted out.
Who allows political leaders to drive around in blue-light brigades? They do! Why should they be exempt from the many impacts of load-shedding which was caused by their own ineptitude in the first place?
The traffic cops running obstruction for them should rather be cracking down on dangerous drivers or doing points duty to help the working population, who actually create the fiscus off which these self-important politicians sponge.
Politicians need rule-makers independent of them, but you can bet they’ll never initiate that.
And that’s because of a fundamental difference between sport and politics — one demands integrity and the other doesn’t.
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