‘We should do what the French and British motorists are doing,” says my friend Ben, as we stare at the images of white mayhem on the television.
“We should take to the streets to protest against these endless petrol price rises.” But of course, it will never happen in Africa. Not soon, anyway.
The African consumer has not yet woken up to the fact that he/she is a consumer with rights. The fact that she/he took part in voting someone into power, along with his whole shady clique, is not connected up in a
line of dots to the Constitution under which he/she lives, which says that the people in power have a responsibility to deliver.
The African citizen (the rural dweller, especially) is too busy getting on with the business of living and dying to ponder the subtleties of the national anthem and the national flag, which jointly, together with the army and the police force and the presidential jet, in some mysterious way add up to a physical representation of the national Constitution.
This runs through my mind as I look out of the vehicle I am driving on to one of the most extraordinary city landscapes I have ever seen – and that’s saying something. This is not an African country endlessly at war, like Angola or Laurent Kabila’s Congo.
The potholes cannot be explained away as the aftermath of long artillery duels. The potholes are evidence of nothing less than shameful neglect on the part of the powers that be, leaving their citizens to struggle through the moonscape of a mess that is their premier city, their commercial showcase to the world, while they pontificate in air conditioned comfort from the padded benches of the General Assembly chamber of the United Nations in New York.
I feel, yet again, an old-fashioned kind of anger as I watch a taxi, a beer truck and a luxury intercity coach fall helplessly, one after another, into a hole the size of the klein gat at Kimberley. (I guess there are some mercies in this world – it could have been the groot one.)
The hole is formed where the neglected tarmac has been progressively eaten away by too much unregulated heavy traffic and the sand underneath has been rapidly washed away by the heavy rains, the continued grinding of trucks, taxis, luxury coaches, motorcycles, funeral hearses, military convoys and every other conceivable kind of pseudo-African transport system you can name.
And this is just one street. The same story repeats itself tiresomely a thousand times in tattered roads that radiate into every neighbourhood of the city.
Initially, staring at the chaos of the logjam around this klein gat, I wonder at the stupidity of the drivers – they could, after all, have taken another route towards their destination, rather than tumbling like lemmings into the same disaster zone and blocking the traffic in all directions for the rest of the day. This town is, indeed, full of stupid drivers.
But that is not the whole story. Stupidity can be controlled. The whole of human history is the story of stupidity alternately controlled and let loose, to be reeled in again by religion, dogma or plain common sense. The problem is, there always has to be someone blowing the whistle. People don’t know how to be people without another person at the helm – a head-lemming who can turn back the grinningly suicidal mass from their avoidable peril.
And yet at this moment, instead of addressing the basic needs of their constituencies, our leaders are sitting in the Big Apple, talking the hind legs off the African millennium and what the rest of the world should be doing for us, leaving their citizens to wallow like upturned turtles in the potholes of what passes for an infrastructure in this Central African city.
It’s the kind of scenario that grumpy expatriates, stranded ex-colonials, ex-National Party voters and Western foreign correspondents thrive on – the pathetic demise of the African dream. It’s the kind of scene made for those malicious headlines that trumpet the hopelessness of Africa as a whole.
What would it take to fix the streets of this African city? To my amateur eyes, not much. Not as much, let’s say, as the cost of one expensive presidential junket to New York, the price of which includes the presidential jet, its crew, cocktails and fuel, the presidential entourage of bodyguards, poison-tasters, concubines, wives, bumbling spin-doctors and other presidential representatives, a royal suite at a hotel in a building owned by Donald Trump, a fleet of limousines that stretches round the block, pocket money pegged to Fifth Avenue prices and a budget to entertain a string of other Third World potentates in the style of the Sheikh of Araby and so on and so on.
“We should take a lead from those European consumers on the television,” says my friend Ben.
“We should toyi-toyi against the spiralling price of fuel.”
Yes, indeed. The trouble is, with Africans like Ben and me, it’s all talk and no toyi-toyi these days.
Forget about the fuel – let’s start with a toyi-toyi against the state of the streets of this town, which you nncould hardly negotiate in nnyour car even if the fuel was free.
Let’s start with the basics.
But it doesn’t work like that. We used to toyi-toyi like hell against the foreign devils, until we sent them packing. But against the arrogant inertia of our own demons, we somehow can’t even get one foot off the ground.
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza