Sour Grapes - The Fruit Of Ignorance: The State Of Our Nation Address, South Africa 2022

Today is Thursday 10 February 2022, and according to all the fanfare in the media, our State President, Cyril Ramaphosa, will deliver his annual State of the Nation Address (SONA) tonight at 7 - not from the usual place, being in Parliament, but from the Cape Town City Hall.

As usual, we can expect, a cavalcade of overpaid puffed up parliamentarians will parade at the entrance dressed in high fashion, with apparent total disregard for the plight of those who are footing the bill. It will feature a lot of broad grins, flashy clothes, broad hats, sparkly bling and labels - and photographers.

It's a prestigious event. At least, it's supposed to be. But there comes a point at which, I feel, stretching the facts to fit a narrative that "everything is just fine" - and to bend over backwards in order to ignore all the flaws in that argument - becomes nothing less than a mockery. It might even be considered an insult to the intelligence of the public.

What do you think Cyril will say in his State of the Nation address tonight? Well, what can he really say? For starters, he could say that SA no longer has a serviceable Parliament building, but I find it doubtful he will admit that this is thanks to the stratospheric level of government incompetence which saw to it that insurances lapsed, security staff were given the weekend off, the building left unlocked, and fire fighting equipment was turned off at the time this obvious false flag event occurred. The court proceedings against the mentally ill homeless man who is the obvious fall-guy for this craziness having been big news lately, I shouldn't have to go at length into the absurdity of the whole thing - suffice to say, if you believe that load of nonsense, you're liable to fall for anything. I doubt that matter will even get a mention however.

Instead, the SONA will probably run very formally along the lines of the official gov.za announcement of the SONA, which makes absolutely zero mention of the incident, or the venue at which the SONA will take place, during which Cyril will try to sound hopeful, in control and like he's in charge of an organization staffed by competent, useful people who have some idea of what they're supposed to be doing, at least in the sense that a toddler playing with an unsupervised primus stove is a domestic accident waiting to happen, and ought to have been prevented.

Meanwhile, the issue I see few talking about, is that the cost of these damages to the Parliament building will be just yet another astronomical sum lumped onto the already crumpling shoulders of the ever-dwindling tax paying portion of the country's working poor - shrinking gradually with each COVID death, each job lost due to shrinking health or investor confidence brought about by the ANC's shenanigans. This tendency to just "write it off" has ever-proceeded on the misunderstanding that "there's plenty more where that came from" which arose during the 1990s when the ANC got the taste for seemingly unlimited public funds. SA had so much money, how would they notice if just a little bit got feet here, or grew wings there? Today, some good while later, SA's currency is languishing at junk-status, our economy is in tatters, and even though Zuma was replaced by Cyril, that "write it off" mindset appears to not have changed.

Meanwhile, Zuma - the rogue president who hijacked his own country and committed treason - is still not in jail for state capture and so far as I know, not a penny of his ill-gotten loot has been recovered. Instead he's still wasting time and taxpayer's money arguing minor points of order on side issues, and it's taken three years just to get a report ready on what he's actually hopefully going to be charged with one day on the "never-never" system. Perhaps the upper echelons of the ANC are hoping he will die of old age before things come to a head, because he promised to take the fat cats with him if he went down, which certainly wouldn't be a bad thing. At any rate, the old man's not getting any younger.

State owned enterprises teeter on near total collapse, as they have done for more than a decade now. Eskom struggles to keep the lights on in South Africa even on a good day and is perpetually threatening to cut the lights if they can't extort another 20% more flesh on top of what is already the most expensive electricity on the planet, if not close to it. The railway network, plundered by Zuma and his Gupta buddies, barely exists still. SAA, once the jewel in SAs crown, is gone, killed outright by ANC corruption. Somehow, surprisingly, the ANC still expects South Africans to swallow the outrageous lie that they are taking a hard line against corruption.

While authorities focus on tightening laws and cracking down on everything traffic related as if to make up for a lack of actual law enforcement, the road network continues to deteriorate. In short, cars are by far more roadworthy than our roads deserve in their current state. With municipal and government fees, retesting fees and renewal fees hiked to more than double what they were just 25 years ago, governments greedy streak is showing a mile wide. On top of that, the license card making machine - made necessary by this very sort of frivolous and pointless extra and over-regulation - broke recently, causing a massive backlog in unnecessary license renewals which nobody in their right mind finds necessary to begin with. That had to be sent for repairs - in Germany. Where were the years when we as South Africa were capable of making these new technologies ourselves? Gone up in smoke with Armscor and Denel, and other victims of state capture.

Government still doubles the cost of fuel per liter to the consumer, for no other reason than "because we can", making transport and cost of living expenses needlessly expensive for the poor everyman who pays more for fuel per liter, and the knock-on effect for business owners who then charge more for supplies and products, hits them again in higher food prices. To make it worse, government plays yo-yo with these prices every other week, knowing full-well that the fuel price going up, pushes up the costs of everything else a notch, and even when the fuel price comes down again, those prices stay the same until the next fuel price hike, when they increase on top of the last increase. It's outright malicious and inexcusable!

As South Africans, we can all list off a string of government entities and departments which have been brought to their knees in the past 30 years, and whose services and capabilities are realistically reaching the point of only existing on paper. Yet can we name any government officials, ministers, MECs, MPs etc. who have been held accountable for these failures while these departments/SOEs were under their charge?

The irony of this is that we never see any ANC leaders take the fall for their cock-ups. Trillions of Rands have disappeared as if by magic - in fact the party has developed quite the reputation as magicians in recent years, the ANC is full of wizards because they know how to make money disappear - but how many senior people responsible have been charged or gone to jail over missing public funds? Conversely, how many failed CEOs/ministers etc. have simply been quietly redeployed, or paid off with golden handshakes instead of being made to face the music?

What's worse is, that this short list of issues I mentioned is only the tip of the iceberg. The very tip. And in the midst of all the expose's of government corruption, incompetence, complicity and failures, government, like Cyril, stand there every time on our TV screens and exclaim how "shocked" they are - while ultimately little to nothing is ever done about it.

Politicians in charge are rich men, and like all rich men, they feel less than nothing for the people with low-income jobs who're sitting in the dark at home because load-shedding. They think, "give them something else to cry about, and they'll soon forget X, Y or Z".

But we don't forget, do we? Our memories are long.

It seems that our government spends more time A) investigating its own misconduct B) blame shifting C) making weak, transparent excuses D) chasing ghosts, witches and vampires or E) misdirecting the publics attention away from issues which we are rightfully entitled and empowered to be duly and truthfully informed about; while it continues to place party politics of the ANC above and before the national interest. Just last week I read that Cyril was in it again for authorizing the use of public funds for party purposes... something which the ANC historically hasn't been able to tell apart.

What I find so mind boggling and astonishing about this huge stinking pile of excrement, is that some people actually expect this sort of ingrained behavior in the ANCs leadership to change for the better, as if things will somehow just miraculously get better - worse, that leopards will change their spots... that still, even after every new lie, excuse or red herring we are served up daily, the same villains responsible for creating the mess we're all living in today, will somehow turn out to be good guys in the end and make everything alright.

So here we are, after another year, 365 daily failures and embarrassments, tonight Cyril will make his SONA speech, broadcast live and online (essentially to the world)... from a country without a parliament, and whose government - whom they represent - is so utterly useless that they allowed its parliament to be burned down. That this was deliberately arranged or by omission of actions is beside the point. I wonder if he and his companions occupying the top of the food chain truly appreciate the irony and implications of this, and if the millions they take home in salaries will sooth the acute embarrassment and shame they ought to feel?

I think that about covers it.

Cheers!