A Country of Agendas

The ineptocracy of our government never ceases to amaze me. My afternoon was spent sitting around the dining room table having a jolly good laugh at the ridiculous level of corruption that accosts us everyday - anybody walking into the house would have assumed that we were having a merry old time exchanging jokes or humorous stories of the past week...when in fact we were discussing the Addington Hospital scandal where 8 billion rand was somehow misplaced (who misplaces 8 billion rand?!) and the fact that the next generation is even stupider than we could possibly have imagined. We didn't find it funny, but it was either laugh at it, or sink into an afternoon of depression thinking about the downhill spiral our country is heading for.

I've written about this many times before, and the fact that I'm moved to write about it yet again, just illustrates how absolutely incongruous I find this situation to be. You know, forget about stealing from us (those who can afford to live in wonderful homes, eat three square meals a day, send our children to good schools, pay towards a medical aid fund every month and generally have good jobs with a steady source of income), these officials in government who are supposed to be elected by the people, for the people, are stealing from their people - the very same ones who vote for them. I think it's disgusting that they've desecrated everything that their forefathers worked for in freeing our country from the Apartheid regime, by using their inherited seats of power to gorge themselves on the public treasury.

Our country survives by using the tax payments of its minority to support the non tax-paying majority. This is something that by now, nearly twenty years after Apartheid was abolished, should not be seen on such a large scale. The main issue is the lack of jobs to support that currently non tax-paying majority...which essentially leads us back to the problem of the state of education in our country. If people are educated, they stand to be more viable for the higher paying jobs, and would have a better chance at improving not only their own quality of life, but that of the rest of their family as well - higher paying jobs would mean a larger source of income and a greater ability to afford a stable quality of life and all the perks that come with it. It would, however, also mean that people are more likely to see through the cheap party tricks our governing body employs in order to win elections. As I drummed into the few learners who I had the opportunity to teach this year, "In the land of the blind, the one eyed is king." Keep the masses illiterate and uneducated, and they're putty in your hands.

And you know, the issue of gross idiocy is not just something that is occurring in only one ethnic group or race - it's across the board. I look at some of the kids and think to myself in awe, "Really, is this what we have deteriorated to?" And the scary part is, these kids will grow up and reproduce, and their kids will follow their example - unless they wake up one morning and realise that they want out of that rut. Sometimes, I look at people my own age and wonder how they made it this far in life (and really, we're only just beginning life.) The culture of irrelevance that is being cultivated is disturbing.

I was talking to a doctor today who said that she receives interns who don't even know half the things that they're supposed to: that terrifies me! She told us of the other day, when she asked for a patient who was hooked up to a ventilator to be moved down a floor for some tests; she left the patient in the care of the nurses and was shocked to see them wheeling the patient out of the hospital lift without the said ventilator. Here was a patient who COULDN'T BREATH, taken off the machine that was helping them to do just that. How are people being pushed through medical and nursing school who don't have the knowledge required to perform their duties effectively - or at all? They end up doing more harm than good. Yet, our government insists on rigging the system towards affirmative action - even in the case of such essential services like medical care - admitting those with below average examination results and turning away others who score well above the minimum requirements...all based on the colour of their skin. I wonder, if producing a generation of sub-par doctors is really a form of population control?

The people we choose to place in power, are the very same ones filling up their own pockets at the expense of the progress of the rest of the country. South Africa is such a potential-rich country, yet she is being exploited in all the wrong ways by all the wrong people. It's sad that in a country with so much resources, majority of its population is still uneducated and living below the poverty line, all because keeping them below the poverty line is what allows those in power to stay in power.