In his classic, The Trouble With Nigeria, the legendary African author, Chinua Achebe, reflects on how things fell apart in his country.
By the time Chinua wrote his book, things had got so bad that “If you want electricity, you buy your own generator; if you want water, you sink your own borehole; if you want to travel, you set up your own airline”.
Indeed, things fall in stages. In SA, for example, we are now at the stage where if you want uninterrupted electricity, you install your own solar; if you want to fly, you forget about SAA.
The problem is that pharmaceutical companies, for now, sell coronavirus vaccines only to governments. If this were not the case, the rich and the middle class would by now have bought their own vaccines. Nobody knows when our incompetent government will vaccinate the majority of us.
When things fall apart, the most dangerous people are the poor, not the rich. The rich use their money to buy services that are supposed to be provided by the state.
Travel from Musina to Cape Town, or from Zeerust to Komatipoort, and count how many children of the rich and the middle class are found in SA’s dysfunctional public schools. You will not find a single privileged child there.
You might also wish to examine the wallets of the rich and the middle class. Each of those wallets has a medical aid card. The rich and the middle class don’t want to find themselves in Tembisa Hospital when they are sick.
For the security of their families, the rich and the middle class have raised vast armies that protect them in gated communities. They have even designed uniforms that make their guards look more menacing than the police.
What about the poor? How do they become dangerous when things fall apart?
We have seen it last week in Zandspruit. Since the poor have no money to buy justice, they simply take matters into their own hands.
If the poor people of Zandspruit had money, they would have hired security guards to protect them from criminals.
Since they cannot not afford security guards, the poor people of Zandspruit placed their hope in the police. And when they were failed by the police, the people decided to become the police, the prosecuting authority, and judges.
That is what middle class commentators call “mob justice”. When things fall apart, poor people are no longer called “people”, they are given a new name – mob. It is not people’s justice; it is mob justice.
When rich people come together and hire their own police in the form of private security, they are not called a mob. They are called ladies and gentlemen.
It is true that not all poor people engage in “mob justice”. Perhaps it is the "criminal" element among the poor.
But danger does not manifest itself only through burned human bodies. It can and does take the form of social perversion and extreme indignity.
It is often the poor who are made to eat snakes and frogs by bogus men of God. It is often the poor who vote for state-capture thieves who masquerade as members of a political party. Indeed, it is often the poor who are victims of their own votes.
When things fall apart, the poor are easily mobilised against those who try to save them. The real scoundrels who victimise the poor are praised as revolutionaries who are targeted unfairly by the rich and the middle class.
The poor are a danger to themselves when they participate in their own destruction. That is why the work of awakening the consciousness of the poor is the most important task of real revolutionaries, those who want to narrow the reservoir of the poor and expand the ranks of the middle class and the rich.
In the end, the question is the same old one: what is to be done? In other words, what can we do to stop SA’s decline? Put differently, what will you do after reading this column?
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