Published: 5 September 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
Last week’s devastating fire in Johannesburg is indicative of the tragic decline RALPH GENENDE witnessed during his visit home this year. But he also found rivers of compassion and courage.
Today I am crying for the beloved country and city of my childhood and early adulthood. I am grieving for the scores of hapless people who died in the Johannesburg apartment block last week. The death of at least 12 children, including a one-year-old, just tears at my heart.
The night-time fire that ripped through the rundown apartment block in the city’s central business district is a searing reflection of just how much is going wrong in South Africa today.
It’s a country with one of the highest unemployment rates, tens of thousands of young people (including the well-educated) cannot find work, poverty is endemic and there is no reliable welfare network to help the many desperate people.
The numbers of homeless around Johannesburg are mind-numbing (15,000-20,000, with some 50,000 and possibly up to 100,000 in the surrounding Gauteng Province). So unsurprisingly, there is violence and crime and misery. There’s also the wide gap between the wealthy and the privileged and the poor and the discarded. And unlike apartheid South Africa, it is no longer simply the gap between whites and other races.
You can explain and rationalise the unemployment and fall in educational and living standards as part of the long legacy of the brutal apartheid system, which gave so little to so many.
It’s much harder to explain the mega-corruption, the state capture of democratic decision-making under former prime minister Jacob Zuma, by ruthless politicians and oligarchs like the Gupters. The daily blackouts across the country, euphemistically referred to as loadshedding, are not the result of inheritance but rather of gross negligence.
The fact that the inferno took place in a condemned building owned by the Johannesburg municipality, but “hijacked” by a criminal cartel, is indicative of the anarchy of this city.
On my recent visit to South Africa, the best-selling book was that of Andre de Ruyter, CEO of the Eskom power utility from 2020-23. Entitled Truth to Power, it is a deeply disturbing account of criminality and corruption at all levels, including an attempt to poison him. The Economist quotes him saying:” You can put solar on your roof, live in a gated estate, have private security, earn a holiday home. But if 90% of the population are suffering, how is that sustainable?”
The acute problems with basic services like water, electricity and provision of security are a failure of government. The fact that the inferno took place in a condemned building owned by the Johannesburg municipality, but “hijacked” by a criminal cartel exploiting migrants and the dirt poor, is indicative of the anarchy of this city.
