Pity The People
Politicians dispose, people suffer. Nowhere is this more evident than in Africa. Where country after country collapses through greed, corruption, neglect, ineptitude and disunity. Where it so often seems that human emotions trump human consciousness, that the tribal mentality is destined to forever take possession of human destiny, direct it to return unceasingly to divisive hatred of one another.People, given the opportunity, will live together in harmony and neighbourliness, forgetting in their human contact with one another - or laying aside for the greater good - ancient tribal animosities. It is when their politicians fail to provide adequately for them, or when the governing administration seeks to take attention away from their own failures and corruption, that they point to the 'others' among them.
It's desperately sad that present day South Africa, after the great celebration in the promise of the country finally delivered from imperialism and apartheid into the capable and able administration of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress as it was then, has begun to collapse back into itself. Despite its huge promise for the future, of collective caring, tribalism is reborn.
Within South Africa itself perhaps a different offshoot of traditional tribalism. This time tribal enmities still assert themselves in the face-off between the rejected Thabo Mbeki and his Zulu rival as head of the African National Congress, and President. Then there is the new economic tribalism of the new social compact of the wealthy and the impoverished slum dwellers. Whose dissatisfaction with their lot and disappointment in its continuance has created a tinder box of anger.
That vast continent is comprised of innumerable tribes, many of whom live adjacent one another, and who intermingle, within arbitrarily-imposed colonialist national boundaries. A South African government faced with the very real desperation of millions of slum dwelling poor has struggled to meet the needs of its people. And because of its relative success, other African countries' unfortunates appraise and praise its momentum.
Immigrants from African conflicts, political strife, government mismanagement taking place in Somalia, Nigeria, Angola, Mozambique and Zimbabwe among other others, have flooded to South Africa for relief, some six million of them, overpowering the country's ability to settle and care for them. For under the South African constitution landed immigrants too have the right to government subsidized homes.
And desperate immigrants, poorer even than South Africa's slum dwellers, will work for far less than the country's indigenous population. And their small successes garner them anger from those who cannot find work, and whose ongoing grinding poverty encourages resentment and violence against the immigrants. Native South Africans speak of ridding themselves of the foreigners.
The beacon of hope that South Africa represented, with its humane and generous policies toward others, has begun to disintegrate under the reality of its growing inability to produce relief for its own, let alone the countless refugees from other neighbouring countries.
Labels: Conflict, Societal Failures, Troublespots
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, November 09, 2008
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