The Times of London, a highly influential newspaper of Europe, posted a write-up by well-respected columnist Jenni Russell on how South Africa is doomed. It was a scathing attack on our Head of State, ‘Honourable’ Jacob Zuma and his lack of interest in the people he supposedly governs.

Opening her column with a brutally honest perspective on the armed robbery that occurred at the Sandton Fire Station on Saturday, Jenni’s first critique is a condemnation of the country’s media – and readers – who have common-placed extreme cases of crime, rendering them almost normal situations:

Imagine a group of armed men walking into a children’s party in Hampstead or Chelsea, levelling guns at 40 parents and 35 children and robbing them of their jewellery and money. Imagine making frantic 999 calls only to find that no one bothers to answer the phone. Imagine running for help to the attendant on duty at the party venue, only for her to tell you that she has no numbers to ring, no panic button and no way of alerting the police.

Social media has many pictures of smiling children sitting on firefighters’ knees, next to elaborate fireman-themed cakes. Families felt safe there. No longer. Distraught, suspicious parents report that all the firemen had left before the robbery happened, that the CCTV was unaccountably dead, and that the robbers had plenty of time to leave before the police turned up.

From top to bottom, South Africa’s institutions are quietly crumbling, disintegrating under the weight of inefficiency, indifference, underfunding and corruption. In the same weekend 2 000 angry, frightened residents of a black township in the Cape protested outside a courtroom in support of a community leader accused of murder. Residents say they have been forced into carrying out half a dozen vigilante killings of suspected rapists, murderers and drug dealers because there is no police station and no policemen for the 40 000 residents, despite years of pleading.

Jenni then shares a personal account:

In the Cape village where I was staying this week, a village of both Cape Coloureds and whites, the same problem is emerging. Two drug-dealers have moved in, selling highly addictive crystal meth. Everyone knows who they are and what they are doing. Everyone is frightened that this peaceful rural settlement will be wrecked by the consequences: desperate addicts, robbery, crime.

Six weeks ago dozens of people marched down the main street begging the police to act. But the local policemen are too scared to respond. They fear retaliation from urban gangs. The villagers are being abandoned. This country is already one of the worst in the world for serious crime, and now it is going backwards. The basic functions of any democratic state — keeping order, dispensing justice, responding to people’s needs — can’t be counted on.

And who is to blame? Zuma, of course:

In the past six years, since the election of the known bribe-taker President Jacob Zuma, progress has spun into reverse. South Africa has become, in the words of a leading trade unionist, a predator state, rather than one that serves its people. A tiny minority of black politicians and businessmen have misused their positions to become extraordinarily rich; extreme inequality has scarcely budged.

Zuma, his allies and the ANC hierarchy are unembarrassed by their plunder. The president has faced several charges of corruption and one of rape. A parliamentary investigation has found him guilty of diverting millions of rands in public money to his own residence. Zuma mocks these accusations while destroying or neutralising institutions that dare challenge him. The elite anti-corruption police unit that investigated him has been disbanded. The public protector, who investigates maladministration in the government, has been accused of being a CIA spy. Zuma’s allies have been installed to run the tax office and the prosecuting system to ensure he and his cronies will escape jail, whatever their crimes.

With robber barons in charge, incompetence and irresponsibility is becoming the norm. The government buys off opposition with money it doesn’t have. This year civil servants got a 7 per cent pay rise, even though growth was less than 2 per cent. Paying for it used up the country’s entire contingency reserve. Last week, after student riots, the government agreed to freeze or cut fees, blowing a vast hole in university budgets and causing the currency to fall almost 5 per cent. Unemployment, at one in four, is the eighth worst in the world, growth keeps falling, only a quarter of the country’s schools are judged to be functional, and female teachers in one province have been forced to have sex with union bosses to get jobs.

If no one in power is prepared to recognise the growing crisis, I fear for the country’s future.

[source: thetimes&biznews]