Kenneth Moeng Mokgatlhe
All the signs are there for us to see that South Africa is on its trajectory toward being a failed state. At the moment, the country’s economic and political system is poorly performing. Hence, we will soon be living in what we call a failed state.
Many leaders of the ANC do not waste time defending the government they are in charge of when it is being labelled by opponents or commentators as a failed state, rightly or wrongly. According to the Oxford Dictionary, a failed state is a country in which the government is so weak that it has lost control of the structures of the state.
The ANC-led government is continuing to face a legitimacy crisis over its failure to meet its constitutional mandate by not being able to deliver basic services to South Africans. This failure or incompetence is birthed by greed, where those who are trusted to look after the money meant for the poor are the ones stealing it.
As a freelance journalist, I was shocked to learn that babies have been placed inside cardboard boxes in Mahikeng Provincial Hospital because there were not enough incubators. As I interviewed one of my sources within the institution of health, she told me beforehand that the MEC of Health, Madoda Sambatha, would never touch the chief executive officer, Nonzaliseko Mendela, because of their closeness. “He will never do anything against this CEO. They are all from the Eastern Cape. He will blame it on the poor nurses,” the source said.
I thought it would end with the babies on the cardboard boxes, but it is deeper than that. When male wards have no electricity, the nurses have to improvise by using rechargeable LED lights. The entire hospital was plunged into complete darkness on Monday when I was there. There are pictures, dated 2019, showing mothers and their babies sleeping on the floor in mattresses, but it is alleged that the situation has not changed.
Tlhabane Health Centre in Rusternburg completely ran out of important chronic disease medication such as ARVs, Refafour (for tuberculosis), Lansaloc (for ulcers), glimipiride (diabetes), and they had no gloves. It is flabbergasting to hear nurses saying that they were instructed to wash and reuse the gloves. That is absurd and reckless because it poses a danger to both medical practitioners and their clients (patients).
Some of the residents in Rusternburg’s township, Tlhabane, said the nurses did not have medication to give for the flu because there was nothing on the shelves. Whose fault is it? Is it nurses again?
The nurses, as they normally do, always improvise to save lives because they have been trained to do so. So they would write down what the common flu patients have to buy from a chemist in order to be treated or cured. That is all they can do. They would not be wrong to advise us to wear warm in order to avoid flu because we would not get medication as the health facilities have run out of medication.
These are all the signs of a nation heading towards a trajectory of a failed state. We are almost there.
I've been covering North West municipalities since 2019, and there are more shocking incidents that have been normalised. Workers in Ramotshere Moiloa Local Municipality spend weeks or months without going to work because the municipality does not have money to buy materials such as paints and other materials for road maintenance. These workers will be paid for not working.
It is not getting any better. The MEC of cooperative government and traditional affairs, Nono Maloyi, shocked me when he said during his Budget Speech this week that more than R6 million will be used to train councillors, ward committee members, and municipal officials. I wondered why communities were not taught by the Independent Electoral Commission to teach people to vote for people who will not need to be trained. Why spend so much money on a futile exercise? We are going to other elections in 2024. Why are we training the people who will leave the state institution with so much money?
Training and mentorship are important for every organisation’s growth, but it cannot be done at the expense of the poor. We must devise means of internalising these training and mentorship sessions. Why spend so much money? The money that we basically do not have.
When I was a communication manager for the Pan Africanist Congress, we attended training and mentorship sessions that were never paid for. We used our own building and invited presenters who would not charge us a fee, and we knew who were qualified to do so. We only bought food and drinks, which shouldn't cost more than R150 per person. Why spend R6 million when we have senior officials in the municipalities who can offer mentorship to those in need?
We are on a trajectory toward a failed state. We are being plunged into darkness by a failing power utility, Eskom. The trains are no longer working because somebody somewhere did not do their job. Our roads are not maintained sufficiently, and new roads are not built to create interconnection between communities. Our education system is in a sorry state. Politicians are stealing from the poor with impunity.
The ANC is quite right: we are not a failed state, but we are not too far to arrive at that point. We will be there before they can even think about it.
Mokgatlhe is a freelance journalist and thought-leader.