Weekly Editorial, Farmers Weekly, South Africa

Weekly Editorial:-

Completely missing the point

The best and the worst never happens in South Africa, Jan Smuts once remarked. And how right the old man was, when you consider the mind-numbing banality that passes as news of national importance these days. Amazingly, for a country facing the impossible task of bridging the biggest wealth gap in the world, the ongoing personal foibles of its president (which, to be honest, I truly couldn’t care about, as long as he gets the job done), continually hog the headlines, while the shortfall is made up of the rude outbursts of a township tsotsi who has twigged on to the bright idea that nationalising the mines would, after all, be the quickest way of getting really rich.

Meanwhile, the startling revelation that only 3% of the country’s sewage works are operational, makes it only onto page 10 of an Afrikaans daily newspaper, while the English press never get around to actually covering it. In the North West, as exasperated farmers in Swartruggens and Sannieshof can attest to, there are apparently no fully functional sewage works. Not a single one. In the Free State, 99% don’t work. In a country as critically water stressed as South Africa, this should amount to nothing less than a national crisis. There should be a flurry of ministerial activity, as departmental heads roll, and anxious engineers are shuttled to and fro across the country, as they frantically try to stem the rising tide of preventable pollution. Instead, the department of water affairs’ official response is that they have, indeed, commissioned a report on the state of sewage works, but are still putting the finishing touches to it.
Meanwhile, livestock carcasses, infected with tapeworm, are turned away at abattoirs after animals drink water with faecal counts way off the charts, polluted water kills hundreds of babies in small-town municipalities, and irrigation farmers wait nervously for their export markets to slam unceremoniously shut.

The bottom line is that no one of consequence seems to be particularly interested in the art of moving turds from point A to point B in such a way that they don’t end up where they don’t belong, like in a river. An essential engineering pursuit first perfected by the Romans thousands of years ago, but not deemed important here in South Africa, as we pursue some very dubious other priorities. Like replacing the some 7 374 police firearms that have gone missing over the past three years. Arms that almost certainly all end up in the hands of criminals, who definitely don’t take them out to the shooting range. Instead, they end up being thrust into your face as your house gets ransacked. After all, have you ever heard of burglars using hunting rifles?

So amazingly, a fair whack of violent crime could simply be avoided if police would just hang on to their weapons. The official response? The minister of police, without the slightest hint of irony, announces that he would like, eventually, to see no-one in the country armed, except the police! Nothing is ever said about how this haemorrhaging of police weapons will be stopped, or what action will be taken against police officers who lose their weapons. Instead, private citizens, punch-drunk by the criminal onslaught, are threatened with lengthy jail sentences if the new firearm legislation isn’t followed to the letter.

One can only still hope that Smut’s prediction will hold. |fw

Courtesy of Farmers Weekly