Celebrating Incompetence and Indifference

On too many occasions to count, the SABC  has displayed programme information that has nothing to do with the programme actually on screen. It might help if SABC staff actually did their jobs, instead of, say, causing allegedly drunken disruption on flights. (I just dreamed that one up). Such clumsy buffoonery is not earth shattering in comparison to looting of trillions and gross neglect of duty. Or in comparison to the treasonous betrayal of long suffering South Africans.

It does illustrate something fundamentally wrong and broken in our country. It indicates how deep the neglect, incompetence and indifference run. If the national broadcaster, which haemorrhages money like a  throat slit from ear to ear, cannot do the barest minimum, cannot meet minimum requirements for a functioning broadcaster, then you can be sure that similar incompetence  will be found elsewhere in government. Perhaps everywhere.

A friend's brother was dying of cancer in a state hospital. She observed, among others, the following, during her daily visits:

Theft was rampant in the wards. Patients would walk in from elsewhere and help themselves to fruit, juice and even her brother's toothbrush. How low have we sunk, South Africa?

We know, of course, that stealing and fraud are not restricted to patients. The Tembisa skinny jeans saga is but one example. And we murder whistleblowers.

Nurses seemed only marginally interested in the welfare of patients. Something that I foolishly thought was the whole business of nursing. Apart from the many South African hospital horror stories,  I know from personal experience that this is the rule rather than the exception. Indifference rules. Incompetence flourishes. And we want to have a National Health Insurance.

What a way to end one's days. What a way to be dying. In the company of cold, uncaring strangers. How low we have sunk. It was a mercy that my friend's brother was taken home from the place where no mercy dwells. A place unacqainted with compassion and all that makes us truly human. Where the idea of Ubuntu is a cruel, hypocritical lie. 

I worked once for a Healthcare NGO, relying on donations, with excellent staff, from managers and doctors to care workers and volunteers. That is not just my opinion. That's the view of many, many patients who travelled far from their own local clinics to attend our clinic. The difference: a management tough on standards and values, soft on people. As you celebrate 113 years of abdication of responsibility and celebration of mediocrity, here's the first thing you need to do, ANC: sack every one of the so-called leaders and managers who have made long careers out of betraying the people of South Africa.

Somewhere in this country are people who do want to serve.

Tips for the blogger gratefully accepted 

Capitec Bank, South Africa  

1378565477

O Tichmann 

+27 833970723

Brain Farts, Racism and Beaches

 A Twitter / X intellectual:

"As black people we must normalize going in numbers on those white beaches that are mostly preferred by Racist.

Make sure they're packed!!! 

Go swim!! Fart!!! And enjoy yourselves!!

It's your country!!...."

Dear Farter

How kak must your life be that the best contribution that you can make to change in our country is to fart on the beach? Why are you so obsessed about where the 'racists' swim or whatever else they do? They were defeated in 1994. For heaven's sake move on. You are going to make yourself ill. The country needs much more than your gaseous contribution. So many needs, so much to do. Your creativity and talent are needed, but not your farts. You really do not have to give utterance to every brain fart. Your philosophy not only sucks but stinks also.

This bit of verbal diarrhoea from you is not worthy of comment, except that it is typical of so much that appears on social media. Lately I've seen some really brainless, racist remarks that belong at the mushy bottom of a pit toilet. This is the kind of comment that no adult with a milligram of common sense or intelligence would make. It's the sort of rubbish that suggests that you can lump and stereotype people on the basis of parentage and circumstances of birth. That is so ludicrously brainless as to merit the Moron's Nobel Prize. It says so much more about the speaker than about those spoken of. None of it is good. Or edifying. You guys have learnt so well from your previous Nationalist masters. In fact, you would have made marvellous little apprentices for a certain half-mustachioed Austrian, with a penchant for nonsensical rants.

I shan't quote any of the wisdom of the Twitter intellectuals here. That would be like laying out great heaps of human dung for futile examination. One of the charming quirks of racist behaviour is making witless comments about people that one has never met (a mercy for those people) and knows nothing about. It may stem from never having had the benefit of the wisdom and experience of older people. It could be from the company one keeps, instead of one's own counsel. True that if one lies down with dogs, one wakes up fleas - and / or excrement. It certainly stems from failure to use the brain that God bestowed (wasted?) on you. It most assuredly stems from that great, gaping hole where conscience and the merest humanity should reside. There is an excuse for the beasts of the wild.

There is a bit of nonsense that is fairly popular on social media. It's the fantasy that black people cannot be racist. That's like saying that black people cannot be jealous, hateful, unreasonable, unreasoning or foolish. When did black people become exempt from any of the foolishness and wickedness that besets the human race? Said it before: you can be as vile as anyone else; why limit yourself? 

Really, guys! Was it for this that so many sacrificed so much in our country? For the worst kind of infantile tit for tat? Go vomit this stuff in your toilet bowl. South Africa needs and demands more of her children.

Until you grow up, we don't need you.

Yours in the struggle to find a few grown-ups in South Africa.

Tips for the blogger gratefully accepted 

Capitec Bank, South Africa  

1378565477

O Tichmann 

+27 833970723