Our nation is upside down. People are angry, desperate, and starving. We face a massive economic collapse. This worries me.
I think it is impossible to look around you at what’s going on, and not have alarm bells going off.
The creeping authoritarianism of the state is no longer creeping: it is sprinting. And the only thing that matches the tyranny of the government’s overreach is its pettiness.
Our civil rights have been murdered. And tax-paying free citizens have been infantilised by our disgustingly paternalistic government.
This tyranny and pettiness manifests itself as police arresting (and handcuffing) an old gogo selling achar in Soweto. Or police aggressively and unlawfully manhandling a young woman into a filthy police truck in Strand. And then not being able to charge her. Or abusing a toddler in front of their parents in Ballito. Or harassing, manhandling, and unlawfully arresting parents for chasing after their children. And arresting people for the crime of “standing still” during the daily 3-hour exercise window.
This isn’t policing. It is oppression.
And while the power-drunk SAPS busy themselves with destroying what little reputation and goodwill they have left with the public, and the Minister of Police states he wants you to have receipts on hand for all those cigarettes you might smoke in your car, the poor are quietly starving to death in their shacks.
Nobody is really paying attention to this. Because the poor are so well-behaved. They simply queue, for kilometres upon kilometres every day, hoping to receive a food parcel to keep themselves and their families fed. Many go home empty-handed, hoping that tomorrow things might be different.
Some resort to begging at robots. At intersections where there may have been only one beggar, or none at all before lockdown, there are now three or more. They are one of many highly visible indicators that the Land of Canaan is hurtling down the Road to Hell at warp speed.
They are in this predicament, because the vast majority of the poor have been unable to work and earn an income for nearly 2 months. Because doing so is illegal. So they are entirely dependent on the state for their survival. The same state that tried making it illegal for NGOs to feed them hot food. And who desperately wants to centralise all distribution of food aid under the administration of incompetent and corrupt kleptocrats.
Because the poor have clearly not suffered enough, if the politicians’ actions are taken as an indication of their heartfelt sentiments.
The reality is that at some point the grand ambitions of our benevolent overlords, may the light illuminate their names, is going to run into the Laws of Economics. When the fiscus finally runs empty, because there has been no economic activity to generate taxes for 8 weeks, the food parcels and grants will dry up with it.
And then, finally, at long last the final straw will break the camel’s back. And we may very well get our Apocalyptic Economic Crisis which Dawie Roodt warned us about weeks ago already.
The Fourth Estate will wring their hands and decry the inhumanity of it all, as the world begins to burn. But the hysteria and lies they peddled in the mainstream media brought us to where we are. They encouraged the economic destruction now wrought.
Politicians will JADE us – Justify, Argue, Defend, and Explain how everything and everyone else is to blame. Not them. Even though it was their policies, corruption, and power-drunkenness that caused it all.
None of this will change the fact that they will have the blood of thousands, if not millions, on their hands.
But that won’t matter. Because when the savagery and bloodshed of a destroyed society consumes us all, excuses and justifications will save nobody.
Written by Gideon Joubert.
Gideon is the owner and editor of Paratus.
He originally published this post on the Paratus.info Facebook page.
