Minister of Water and Sanitation Zenso Mchunu was on a news network this week talking about the water supply crisis various parts of South Africa are experiencing.
He said what we all know – the government has not adequately maintained any infrastructure for the past 30 years. This is not due to a lack of money.
As with Eskom, it is a case of crass incompetence and a staggering lack of duty towards the people of South Africa.
In a country where we celebrate every hero, rename every street, and print T-shirts to ululate every cause and every memory, we have become the proverbial calendar country.
Calendar countries are where civil servants and NGOs sit around and look at the calendar to see what event must be organised next for more T-shirts to be printed, more celebrities to be invited, more promises to be made, and money appealed for.
October is filled with such dates: October 1 is International Day of Older Persons, October 2 is World Habitat Day, October 5 is World Teachers Day, October 10 is World Mental Health Day and World Homeless Day. October 11 is International Day of the Girl Child, October 13 is International Day for Disaster Risk Mitigation, October 15 is International Day of Rural Women, October 16 is Word Food Day, and October 17 is International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.
That’s a lot of T-shirts and we’re only halfway through the month.
We have ‘celebrified’ human suffering and its interventionists such as donors, activists, civil servants and politicians. It is why water-tap ribbon-cutting became a celebrity event all over South Africa, but the pipes that must bring water to those taps have been neglected for more than 30 years by the same calendar-watching and T-shirt-printing civil servants and NGOs.
Today, all over our country, there are new taps that no longer provide water. But there are T-shirts in many cupboards that celebrate and commemorate the event that was staged.
The VIPs who were invited to this celebratory event have all moved on.
They have never worn the T-shirt again, and they don’t know whether the people still have water. Or housing. Or food. They consumed their part of the R5 000-plus per person overhead cost for the event. For them, it’s done.
This ongoing ‘celebrification’ of poverty interventions is why we have a complete system collapse in South Africa and other developing nations.
We will fawn over who attended the opening of a tap, but the suffering people whom this should be all about are down-graded to a two-sentence paragraph filler to the celebrity story.
The main issue of intelligent solutions to poverty drifts into becoming a non-issue because the T-shirts, money, event organisers, tenders, photo-ops, and the glorification of politicians and VIPs dominate the story.
The competencies – such as looking after infrastructure to make sure the taps can keep supplying water to suffering people – become a B-grade movie.
The celebrity narrative has taken over. Stories about the suffering of South Africa’s people are now only commemorated on a T-shirt or calendar.
In 1988, Bright Blue gave South Africa a song of which the meaning still prophetically reverberates in our political life today. Part of its lyrics are: My friends, he said, ‘We’ve reached our goal. The threat is under firm control. As long as peace and order reign. I’ll be damned if I can see a reason to explain why the fear and the fire and the guns remain. It doesn’t matter now. It’s over anyhow.’ He tells the world that it’s sleeping. But as the night came round, I heard its lonely sound. It wasn’t roaring, it was weeping. It wasn’t roaring, it was weeping. It’s still around, it’s still around, it’s still around oh no.
It’s still around. Civil servants may only see it on a calendar. But millions of South Africans live it – and weep it – daily. It’s still around.
* Lorenzo A. Davids.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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