Even before G20 delegates had left, the great scam was unravelling.
The stores are expected to be buzzing today as shoppers rush to grab a Black Friday deal.
While many will be eager to score a deal, others have long labelled the shopping holiday a scam.
Most simply can’t afford to participate. And yet every year, credit card limits are maxed, and loan sharks come to shore. Last year, more than R5.4 billion was spent on Black Friday weekend. It is an eye-watering amount in a country where the average median household income is less than R8 000 a month.
And it is not only citizens who are feeling the pinch. Several government departments have also had their budgets slashed. This leaves the poor and vulnerable more exposed and accelerates the decline in service delivery for all South Africans.
And while those who lead the country earn millions a month, they are often found to be morally bankrupt.
A G20 scam
They have borrowed goodwill from the successful G2O Leaders’ Summit. But even as guests arrived, the fresh lick of paint applied to make us look good was peeling.
Politicians promise that clean-up and service delivery operations will continue, but it took just one storm for them to be found out.
Suddenly, the potholes had returned, traffic lights broke, and power was cut to many parts of Gauteng. Premier Panyaza Lesufi may take great pride in the fact that these largely didn’t affect delegates of the summit, but he should be ashamed of the state of the province he runs outside of the narrow corridors of affluence and excess that visitors were shown.
To his credit, he has been trying innovative ways to fix his province’s issues, particularly crime, but even the best ideas are undone by weak implementation. He is also managing a system in which corruption is part of the currency and self-enrichment trumps public service.
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If not corruption, compromise
This road to enrichment is lined with promises as empty as our potholes and enough harmful compromises to fill an Uber Eats addict.
Just weeks after his boss, President Cyril Ramaphosa, had promised that taking in undocumented Palestinians would be a one-off, Deputy President Paul Mashatile told parliament this week that debt write-offs to municipalities would also not become the norm.
While write-offs will fix the immediate issues and allow citizens to receive the much-needed services and help they need, they are only a band-aid for the bigger issues, which he, as head of government business in Parliament, should be proactive in addressing.
We cannot be constantly sitting on the edge of a crisis of our own making. That is evidence of weak leadership and shallow, short-term thinking that puts our country at risk now and into the future.
Whether on Black Friday, Black November, or election day, let’s not, in the hype of it all, fall for the cheap tricks of politically and morally poor politicians.
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