Yesterday I spent the day with my friend Leigh, taking him to the Provincial Eye Hospital in town. He is a car guard who used to work on oil rigs and now is dependent on government to survive. After six hours of hospital time which was remarkably short thanks only to the care and consideration of some of the staff and the fact that Leigh is elderly and nearly blind we stopped in the nearby botanical gardens and sat on one of my favorite benches under a massive, magnificent Cordyla Africana – wild mango tree as displayed in the photo.

Driving through town, seeing the decay of one of the prettiest cities in the world and considering a new initiative to provide shelter for homeless people got me musing...

 

South African government employees are the highest paid and with the extended public works program and State Owned Enterprises they are the biggest employer by far. In terms of service delivery they have failed and more importantly have lost the trust and respect of the people they are supposed to serve. International sponsorship has dried up and the world is increasingly disinterested in the shameful state of our nation as they worry about bigger concerns. The only way communities will survive, thrive and increase property value is to provide for their own services and pay those who can do the job on a performance basis only. Building shelters for the homeless is a wasteful distraction. Creating an environment for business to thrive and employ the jobless should always be the sincere and erstwhile mission of good government. The time has come for admission of failure and an earnest and sincere commitment to do what’s right.

 

Honest folks supporting government generally get paid much less unless of course they are directors and shareholders whose generous remuneration is under scrutiny of the only functional government service - tax collection. This department also affects folks who have invested in property and want to sell so many folks are reluctant to stop paying for local government services half delivered.

 

Unfortunately international sponsorship of the jobs for buddies corruption has ended and the world is increasingly disinterested in the shameful state of our nation as they worry about bigger concerns.

The only ones still funding are the taxpayers who now realise they can’t carry the bill for all those in the pen. Communities that have realised that the only way to save their property investments is to sort the provision of power, water and sanitation themselves will survive and thrive while those that don’t will simply disappear, their properties worthless.

A consequence of the ineptitude of the jobs for buddies scheme is massive retrenchements and unemployment and now we have a government desirous of building places where the homeless can be delivered and no doubt forgotten as they really don’t care. It seems the term “shelter” is a euphamism for concentration camp. The first, designed to house 800 people will no doubt house many more as the program gets under way but will not even put a dent in the number of homeless in eThekwini. We have seen the horror of what these places will be. Not in old war movies but here in our country in these times. A government serious about job creation is more credible than one wanting to apply a patch remedy to the unemployment they have caused.