This has been one of the worst weeks to be a South African. We have had an almost endless loop of mayhem in the Johannesburg inner city; while the low-scale civil war in Tshwane quietens to a seething ferment. Now we are preparing to bury women.
One was a women’s boxing champion - killed at the hands of her estranged policeman boyfriend, himself died in custody.
The other was a first-year university student, raped and then bludgeoned to death with a scale when she went to pick up a parcel at the post office.
We dare not forget their names, Leighandre Jegels and Uyinene Mrwetyana, because to do so would render them meaningless statistics in a war that the academics and politicians hygienically term gender-based violence; a euphemism for rape and murder or just a side order of institutionalised contempt, bullying, sexual harassment and abuse.
We dare not do that, because then we lump them with Jesse
Hess, Janika Mallo, Lynette Volschenk and Meghan Cremer - who in truth we have almost already forgotten about.
They are all just the tip of a far bigger iceberg, just like the desperate scenes of public violence, greed, thuggery and rampant lawlessness are the symptoms of a greater malaise besetting us.
We can wring our hands and rend our hair about unemployment, the spiralling cost of living and
the rising tide of desperation, but those too are part of a greater problem that has its roots in a society where the elites have enriched themselves to the extent that our state-owned enterprises have metastasised into cancerous tumours that actually threaten our entire economy.
We have a society that turns a blind eye to state capture and corporate collusion - and to the smallanyana skeletons that seem to render our politicians either wholly impotent or seized with the existential threat of going to jail. Now we are seeing it playing out on the streets, in real life and real time as the doctrine of “our turn to eat” plays out to the lowest common denominator with no consequences for breaking the
law; plundering, pillaging and raping; targeting those perceived to have no rights: women and foreigners.
We are teetering very close to the edge of a real, not an imagined anarchy, where it actually becomes everyone for themselves and the devil take the hindmost.
In the bitterest of ironies, we have a young woman, on the
cusp of a better life (she managed to get to university unlike so many others), goes to the post office (another failing, over-staffed, cash-sucking SOE) to pick up a parcel, where she is murdered by a staff member (a convicted felon previously charged with rape).
Just over two weeks ago Gauteng High Court Deputy Judge President Phineas Mojapelo declared the gratuitous display of the old South African flag hate speech.
This week, the rest of Africa effectively did it to our new
flag.
We’ve failed.
We need to reboot South Africa, while we still have the chance.
* Kevin Ritchie is a journalist and former newspaper editor.