In a Nutshell: Challenges and other things

Dear fellow South Africans, my first challenge in the day is getting these old bones out of bed in the morning. Following on that, I then need to face the challenges that I generate myself, for myself, until I hit the hay that night.

One could say that it is a challenge just handling the challenges. Naturally, after stepping over the threshold and entering the nasty real world outside, the challenge equation is multiplied.

Traffic lights are the bane of any motorist’s life as they usually turn to red at the most inconvenient moment, that is if they are working at that particular time of the day.

Seems our particularly virulent thunderstorms can be accused of malfunctions due to lightning bolts, but a darker side is because of some enterprising and opportunistic thief’s nocturnal venture of stealing copper cable. Perhaps South African workmanship and installation and maintenance quality control can also be to blame?

I saw photographs some short time back, of traffic lights on a street corner in some town in Australia, that although they were standing on a flooded street corner, the lights were still going through their routine phase of red – yellow – green. Why do ours not seem to be able to handle such adverse working environments?

Do traffic lights also have challenges, namely water and cable thieves? But, back to us. If it is not a municipal challenge in the form of an erratic water supply, then a provincial challenge awaits us, inasmuch that tarred roads are no longer a smooth black ribbon disappearing into the distance.

Sections of the road now become a hellish meandering zigzagging path between the potholes of varying depths and diameters, that crater the tarred surface. Finally, in this triad of challenges, we have the governmental challenges that are many in number and complex their machinations.

Strange that we fellow South Africans, when hooked by any one of the authoritarian generated challenges aforementioned, we are very quickly corralled and summarily dealt with, according to the rules of disobedience.

Whereas, those very special fellow South Africans somehow manage to negotiate the shallows and escape the rocky reef and even come out smelling of roses and not khakibos.

Due to the fact that there is no accountability being visibly meted out in higher places, it has now become the norm to thumb the nose at authority and say “what you gonna do about it?”

Just by exercising the rule of law and punishment, the fellow South Africans think carefully before doing a wrong, because there are consequences. We have a friend who lives in an estate and he is peeved that some residents owe levies going back months and months.

When one resident was asked as to why he would not pay what he owed, the reply was “No! And what you going to do about it?”.

My conclusion. The culture of being honourable and paying what you owe is no longer passé – instead, it is a case of seeing what you can get away with, without being chastised and taken to task.

Definitely not how my children were raised, as I should imagine were most people’s, and obviously not what some of my fellow South Africans consider to be an important trait – and this to them is the challenge, being an honest and upstanding fellow South African. They just can’t do it! Not in their genes!

HAVE YOUR SAY

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