A nod to South Africa’s past, future and present

THE struggle was fought, and it was won through the grace of God. Too much blood was spilt for the liberation of this country. Too many people died fighting for our Great Azania.

There are many freedom fighters who died and never got to witness the fruits of their struggle. There are many children who were born as orphans, who never saw their fathers.

Many of those brave young liberators, and many of their bodies, have not had the befitting dignity of being repatriated to their home soil for burial.

Even during the time when many were returning, there were relatives who waited, with bated breath, for their loved ones to be among those body bags. Unfortunately, they waited in vain, and their sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, fathers, and mothers never made it home.

For some of those who made it back, many died shortly thereafter, including my own cousin, who left the country in his adolescence.

There are also many parents who eventually passed away without knowing what happened to their children. They bade farewell to their treasured offspring, on the promise that they would receive military training to liberate them and generations to come from the very evil regime that was the apartheid government.

I can all but imagine the pain and trauma of those parents who departed from this world with no clue, letter, or rumour of their children’s well-being. They obviously never lost hope. They endured beyond the pain of waiting until they were no more, until the time arrived that their breath separated from their hope.

Although no one is talking about these heartbreaking issues today, “our” government and those in authority don’t seem to have a memory of the suffering experienced during the liberation of our country. Not even the freedom fighters who vanished in exile.

There are also some who never left the country, who disappeared at the hands of the apartheid police’s “Special Branches”. Their deaths were merely dismissed as suicide or “inconclusive circumstances”.

This is no different to the abhorrent murders meted out by the genocidal Israeli government against Palestinian prisoners of war across the Occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip today.

Today, as a father and a grandfather, I look in despair at the country which lost so much of its soul for our liberation, and I ask myself: “Who benefited from that?” Our country has regressed compared to the time I was growing up. We are plagued with lawlessness from the highest echelons of our government all the way down to the lowliest civil “servant”.

I can only applaud Provincial Commissioner of KwaZulu-Natal Lieutenant-General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi for his bravery and patriotism to take a stand and expose some of the rot that we all knew was taking place across the three spheres of government.

There is, however, one efficiency and competency which I have noticed from this so-called democratic GNU: the collection of outstanding traffic fines by our metro police officials. There are heavy roadblocks on off-ramps and on-ramps onto freeways designed to feed white-capitalist apartheid cities with poor Black working-class labourers, and now professionals.

You may be forgiven for thinking that there is some serious crime “intelligence” operation underway, but only to discover that they are hunting down citizens for outstanding traffic fines.

Heavy state resources are deployed to intimidate and shake down struggling civilians for outstanding traffic fines. Most, or all, of those fines are minor and are without warrants of arrest.

Economically battered citizens are unlawfully threatened with arrest unless they part with their last few rand to make payment. The enforcement of just and proper laws isn’t a bad thing per se; however, terrorising struggling citizens to fund the government’s corruption is something else.

Private initiatives such as Outsurance’s pointsmen are doing the real job of making the lives of motorists better and easier across our roads. Without them, it is the homeless that take initiative and direct the traffic — not our law-enforcement agencies for whom we pay our hard-earned taxes.

It is the ones who are left behind by our democracy that are able to bring order to our roads. The forgotten citizens are the ones who sweat and labour for us, sometimes in the rain, while our ordained metro police hide under bridges manning ineffective speed-traps.

It is disgusting that these public officers have a daily collection target to victimise and penalise struggling citizens instead of serving and protecting us. This is not what my peers sacrificed their lives for, and we need to remind “our” government what their priorities should be come next year’s Local Government Elections.

* Thami Nodwele is a Pastor and a published author of Vanishing Nation, I Will Meet You on the Other Side, and Deliberately Compromised. He writes in his personal capacity.

** The views expressed here do not reflect those of the Sunday Independent, IOL, or Independent Media.

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