In a country of war-like levels of violent crime; the constant abuse, rape and murder of children; and staggeringly brazen levels of corruption; South Africa’s loudest political protests have largely been framed as responses to mere service delivery inefficiencies.
In the face of gross moral breakdown, our public conversation has confined itself to a critique of the mere workings of government.
In his State of the Nation parliamentary address last Thursday evening, President Jacob Zuma failed to transcend this technocratic fixation – the solutions proposed did not broker anything beyond the increased lubrication of government machinery.
Whilst service delivery is a legitimate crisis requiring indignant and urgent action, one could arguably assert that the glaring absence of a deeper kind of protest to our society’s grotesque habits is of an even more alarming nature than municipal ineptitude and callousness.
Rather than confronting the darkness of our country directly, we have instead neglected the issues in a blaze of government-speak and rhetoric. Instead of turning to the difficult yet simple light of human morality, we have relied on technical intervention alone to solve deeply spiritual problems.
Even in the language of the official opposition to the ruling party, the terms of debate have largely remained that of inefficiency and delivery. The problem with this approach is that it never answers the question that is truly at the heart of our politics: what has gone so horribly wrong in our land?