Freedom counts for little when you’re drowning in garbage

What SA needs is a national service outside the SA National Defence Force but run on the same disciplinarian lines.

Picture: Michel Bega

A friend who lives part of the year in Dresden in Germany prepared me before I went there. I should keep an eye out for traffic lights and pedestrians, he said. Even when there is no traffic to be seen in every direction, they will not cross a street until the green signal comes on.

And, sure enough, I saw that happening often.

Plenty of people – Anglo-Saxons and their colonials – will look at that and point to the alleged German nature: humourless; follow orders to the letter; regimented.

While there is a grain of truth in every stereotype and Germans are some of the most self-disciplined people on the planet, I prefer to look at it in another way: the sign of civilisation is doing the right thing … even when no one is looking.

In South Africa, we just don’t get that. We will violate laws, ethics and the code of just plain good manners in broad daylight, even with the whole world watching. We don’t care. We just pursue our “I got mine” philosophy, which is little different from what motivates animals. When you layer that selfishness on top of weapons-grade ignorance, you get South African drivers.

So I get hooted at when I decide to go all the way around a traffic mini-circle near us, while everyone else takes the short cut because it’s on a one-way street.

Even when there is no one in sight, I don’t cut that corner. Maybe I have some German in me somewhere – or maybe I just appreciate that if I endlessly do what I want, I will inconvenience or hurt other citizens. And that is wrong.

These days, my attitude – which has got a lot more conservative the older I’ve become, funnily enough – would get me classed as borderline fascist, militarist (I learned a lot of myself in uniform) or old-fashioned colonialist (my belief system was born equally of Catholicism and English correctness in one of London’s colonies).

It seems to have become fashionable – among liberals particularly – to look down their aristocratic and well-educated noses at “old fashioned” values.

They all got a huge shock with Donald Trump and Brexit.

I am not defending either of those bizarre and destructive phenomena, but the “social justice warriors” were so busy manufacturing outrage that none of them saw it coming.

So I was expecting it when some of these leftie liberals started having a go at Joburg mayor Herman Mashaba after he sent some of his people involved in the A Re Sebetseng clean-up campaign to Rwanda to see how they have created the cleanest city on the African continent.

Kigali, the Rwandan capital, is spotless when compared to any South African metropolis. But Mashaba’s critics rabbited on about how Rwandan President Paul Kagame is allegedly a dictator and human rights are not high on his agenda.

Here, where we are “free and democratic” and drowning in piles of garbage and a tsunami of illegal migrants, we go out of our way not to be seen to be “oppressive”. So, people get away – literally – with murder.

I think what we need is a national service – true work for the country – outside the SA National Defence Force but run on the same disciplinarian lines.

It would provide jobs for the youth and give them hope, as well as the sort of backbone they are going to need in the future.

Germany works. Rwanda works.