If you drive on the same road often, you may have developed an innate self, vehicle and road symbiosis where you can predict, even in the dark, where a pothole is and dodge it every time, especially if you’ve hit it before.
This mind and pothole telepathy is telling of two things.
How far we can stretch ourselves, before we snap. And how far beyond the impoverished spectrum is our government willing to whisk us.
Let me explain:
South Africa's municipalities need R51 billion to avoid collapse. They could owe their creditors so much on their own. I don’t think that highly of their corruption.
Lower revenue collection rates, non-payment and illegal connections are a few more heavy rocks in the R51 billion bag, or a total collapse of municipalities. About R35 billion of the debt is to Eskom.This is how South Africa is stuck between a rock and a dark place.
The people say it's the government. The government says it's the people.
But it is the people who will pay. With candle lit, empty dinner tables.
These people are recipients of taps without water. They are Olympic swimmers in pit toilets. Conductors of conniving electricity connections. They are magicians.
While you master telepathy to dodge potholes, they have advanced to filling their stomachs with food for thought.
Squeezing water out of a rock has always been frowned upon by the world’s population, since the invention of time.
Water is money, we are the rock, and the government is squeezing time and again, like how they handle triggers on pump action shotguns loaded with rubber death. I say death, since we have established that a bullet kills, rubber or lead.
As to how far beyond the impoverished spectrum our government is willing to whisk us: Well, the people bearing the burden of the billions say the government isn’t bothered with bowling us straight back to the dark ages. And I don’t mean a few years ago when loadshedding became a thing. Or recently, when it graduated to reduction.
We either pay up or dark down, like we do when the government squeezes.
Blessed are the fat cats in seats, not the people, when the government sneezes.
The power crises has brought about an emergence of a new breed.
When black power is enticed by white money, white elephants are born in townships.
It has become politically correct to say “township”. Everyone lives in squalor, there are just colourful tin cans built around us.
Clouded under a web of illegally connected wires. We too are the problem.
Everyone wants a plug. But nobody is building circuits.
We are kicking sand, and nobody is building castles.
Where do we get the audacity to play matador when we know very well that the government is the bull? Too often we get trampled on and they don't bother checking under their hoovs.
While you master telepathy to dodge potholes, "the people" have advanced to filling their stomachs with food for thought.