In the past week, I have received two interesting communications. One an email from the AA, and one from a WhatsApp group. Too long to give our readers chapter and verse, so I have had to shorten them, which is a pity. But I am sure you will get the drift.
South Africa – a failed state and gangster paradise, all rolled up in one
First, the press release from the AA: The Automobile Association (AA) of South Africa has called on every municipality to publish a list of its broken traffic lights and streetlights. Each fault should carry a reference number and a repair date. The AA wants the most urgent repairs done before the local government elections on 4 November and the festive season. Transport Month ends this week, but its final days still give government and councils the chance to lead before voters go to the polls: publish the list now and update it weekly. In July, Kariega businessman Jevon Dyer loaded about five broken traffic lights onto a trailer and offloaded them outside the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality’s customer care office. The lights outside his shop in Caledon Street had been out for months, and he said he had seen several accidents and near misses at the intersection. “I thought, why not? I was just tired,” he said at the time. About a week later, the lights were still lying outside the building. Days after his protest, the metro’s political head for roads and transport, Yolisa Pali-Jongilanga, told a council committee that the city could no longer justify repairing the same traffic lights because thieves stripped their cables within weeks. On the M17, she said, thieves stripped the lights seven weeks after repairs. “We cannot afford to continuously repair the same traffic lights every three months due to repeated acts of vandalism,” she said. “It almost seems as though we are feeding the thieves each time we do repairs.” Nelson Mandela Bay is not alone. In Pietermaritzburg, some residents wait in afternoon peak traffic for almost an hour when the lights on key routes are out. In Johannesburg, the Johannesburg Roads Agency (JRA) said in July that more than 300 of its traffic signals had been stolen or equipment had been vandalised. By then, the lights at Chadwick Avenue and 5th Street in Wynberg had been out for more than a year, and the JRA said there was “currently no date for repairs”. In Polokwane, residents reported in July that 21 intersections had broken lights. Some councils have stopped repairing lights at the worst-hit intersections. Ekurhuleni spent roughly R120 million on repairs in a single financial year before replacing signals at some high-risk intersections with stop signs. The city said some of those stop signs may become permanent. In Centurion, the city decommissioned the signals at Botha and Hoffmeyer streets and downgraded the intersection to a three-way stop. In Gauteng, the provincial Department of Roads and Transport manages only 547 of the province’s more than 4,500 signalised intersections. In July, it appointed contractors for a repair and restoration programme that it expects to take 36 months. And it goes on and on. “When a traffic light dies, the driver waits. The person on foot takes the gamble,” said Bobby Ramagwede, CEO of the AA. “Mobility is not transport. It is the freedom to get to work, get your children to school, get home again and change your circumstances. Every dead intersection takes some of that freedom away, and it takes it first from the people who walk. People ask why a mobility organisation cares about the person on foot,” said Ramagwede. “My answer is simple: if it moves, it concerns me. People crossing a dead intersection are road users too.” Consumers with a mobility-related issue that needs the AA’s mediation can email
Secondly, the WhatsApp asked why South Africans keep asking how much worse things can get. That is the wrong question. The question is what happens when decline becomes permanent. For more than thirty years we have adapted to failure. When electricity failed, we adapted. When policing failed, we adapted. When municipalities failed, we adapted. When water systems failed, we adapted. When roads deteriorated, we adapted. When corruption was exposed, we adapted. Every crisis became another inconvenience to work around. Every failure became another expense. Every expense became another sacrifice. What we call resilience today would have been considered unacceptable twenty years ago. The danger is not the collapse of institutions. The danger is the collapse of expectations. South Africans no longer expect functioning municipalities. South Africans no longer expect reliable electricity. South Africans no longer expect effective policing. South Africans no longer expect government accountability. We expect failure and then congratulate ourselves for surviving it. That is not resilience. That is surrender disguised as resilience. The average South African is now paying to replace functions that government was created to provide.