Our new secular Hell

Yesterday I experienced a secular vision of hell.

I had to make a quick journey out from Auckland Park, where I have a small nesting place, to North Riding down the Malibongwe Road, and then I had to take the Witkoppen Road to another place after which I was to return to the home nest, in the North east of the city. The ‘mal’ in Malibongwe means madness in one of the region’s languages; and on Thursday 24th Jan it lived up to that implication.

This, usually brief encounter, a round trip of some thirty five kilometres that would normally take around forty five minutes, eventually took four hours.

I once, in my foolhardy youth, drove from our city Jozi, to the coastal city of Ethekewini [sic], which I presume is where Durban once was, in four hours and a few minutes, but that of course was back in the sixties when such madness was a rite of passage..

Now it takes that long to get around roughly a quarter of the city! What a pass!

Power failures abounded. Chaos, is mile upon mile of sleek, shiny cars, big, smoke belching trucks and articulated vehicles, buses, broken down clunkers: all heaving fumes into the universe as each vehicle methodically, and with staggering self-discipline for the most part, approaches yet another intersection; and inches through, car by alternate car, in a grinding minuet of endless four way stops,four way stops, four way stops, four way stops... ad infinitem.

I decided various things during that long ride

Firstly at 62 you don’t get that many new experiences, and sitting in the biggest gridlock in national history [to date… watch this space] was a new experience.

Secondly. I shall no longer refer to the euphemism “load shedding” that has been coined by our electricity utility. “Load shedding” communicates the idea of an orderly transfer of scarce resources from one region to another, the phonics of the word make it sound similar to “sharing” and so we are expected to derive comfort from the use of this word to imply “fairness”... No more.

What I and about half a million other metal armoured bodies experienced last Thursday was a vision of orchestrated chaos such as Ayn Rand in her wildest and most fervent imagination could not have truly envisaged: a city paralyzed.

When Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged [1958] I read it as fiction and found it delightfully entertaining: in retrospect almost a Mills and Boon experience... with a message of warning… Her thesis was simply that a world run by those filled with Resentiment was a world on its way to secular hell.

Lately I have remote viewed the meltdown in our neighbouring country as: ‘Ayn Rand: “Atlas Shrugged” on steroids’, and with consequent rising concern. But this experience yesterday made the entire idea, that she described, of a society in chaos, as a result of the people who knew how things worked being replaced by the people that didn’t, that my skin crawled at the horror of it all. Thank goodness there wasn’t a tsunami or other natural disaster on its way, we would have all drowned at the wheel.

For this strategic error, on the part of our leadership, has struck at the most vulnerable part of our economic plan with an almost perfect symmetry, ironic really given that our former President was jailed for 27 years for [among other things] setting out to sabotage the power system.

For our leaders to somehow ‘misplace’ the development of new power capacity, perhaps in the interests of, or distracted by, short-term aggrandisement, amounts to an un-natural catastrophe.

Their current prevarication, obfuscation and general squirming about and whining collection of Clintonesque Mea Culpa's, cannot distract from that overwhelming error. This dereliction of duty will confound all the good works of the new ruling class, and could well permanently stain Thabo Mbeki’s legacy. To mangle Shakespeare’s Marc Anthony … The cock-ups men make live after them…the good shall often be interred with their bones: think Bill Clinton think Monica Lewinsky… Don’t think… longest period of sustained and sustainable economic growth in American history. Ditto Thabo.

That was my third thought, and carried me eventually to the junction of Malibongwe and Witkoppen, haunted by Herbert’s observation regarding the “Want of a nail” [see my previous blog]. It did not give me any pleasure to realise that this crisis in our power supply system is the first real post-revolutionary problem that cannot be blamed on Apartheid: an inheritance has been put at risk.

I now proceeded to inch my way parsimoniously east along the fifteen kilometres of Witkoppen en route to the Old Pretoria road at the north east junction of the city. We were heading inexorably towards a heavily pregnant wall of deep dark cloud from which long extended tendrils of water could be seen drenching forth on at least a tenth consecutive day of persistent rain. By this time it was after four o clock, my journey up Malibongwe had taken nearly two hours and the madness had yet to fully manifest

Ultimately the dams of decorum burst and I [and probably others] watched in disbelief as increasingly desperate taxi drivers, well behind on their daily schedule of human delivery units, took increasingly insane measures to beat the clock. They obviously had to make their quotas in the face of a power failure so total we were faced with an almost limitless ocean of crawling metal. … Poesa* Thursday be dammed! We sat dry mouthed and watched the so-called new recapitalised, 16 seater Quantums slipping, slithering and sliding about on mud soaked sloping roadside verges, dancing while a torrential downpour was sent to add more misery to further misery.

I saw at least six such taxis come so close to overturning, teetering at times on one side side of wheels only, that heart was alternately in my mouth and jogging about with mirth. One Quantum slithered past me and I caught the rolling whites of their eyes from many a full load of passengers as their transport keeled yacht like to the left, and desperate contents hiked brutally to the right to keep the things on their wheels. At one time I had to remind myself to use tji kung breathing to avert what felt like an immanent heart attack so tangible was their stress..

And through this entire journey I saw no form of authority in evidence other than the random police vehicle trapped in the same gridlock.

There were a cluster of Metro cops standing at the slipway joining the Rivonia Road with Grayston Drive; but that was one of the few places where there traffic lights were actually working and traffic was moving relatively freely…. or as freely as possible through a police gauntlet: talk about shuffling the deckchairs about on the Titanic.

As for the other thirty odd kilometres of chaos… not a copper in sight. Head of metro police, Mr Wayne Minaar’s words rang hollow. He said on radio a few days ago that he and his team had a plan. Well we saw it. At least two hundred thousand vehicles were abandoned to their fate as the Metro cops simply buckled. The voice on the radio said that the cable thieving syndicates were taking the opportunity to steal as much cable as possible during the power cut reasonably secure that they could work without interruption from the pesky electricity. Maybe the Metro cops were hoping they would make their getaway using the slipway to Grayston.

This was a picture of meltdown. When I eventually saw the Metro guys virtually barricading the only part of town that was moving, my umpteenth and spleen filled thought was about Nero fiddling while Rome burned.

I don’t live in the crowded outer North west of the city and seldom go there. The last time was three months ago and i faced a similar gridlock albeit a shorter journey and only two hours to do what used to take twenty minutes. That which happens once may be an exception ... that which happens twice... becomes a trend.

I felt that if I were a person who lived in the North West: in that ‘cookie cutter’ housing territory that looks like a low rise Hillbrow spreading virus like un-aesthetically towards many horizons. And if I realised that this was to be my lot for the rest of my probable career or at least the next ten years, which basically means forever because the world moves so fast that if you fall behind you can never catch up... then I would begin implementing immediate migration plans at once, before the value of housing in the region goes into property meltdown.

Alternatively I would shoot myself.