GOOD press statement by Brett Herron,
GOOD: Secretary-General & Member of Parliament
03 May 2022
In the early days of the Covid pandemic, as the world locked down and nobody really knew where we were heading, wise people were quick to remind us that crises present fertile environments for new opportunities to seed and flourish.
Albert Einstein, himself, coined the phrase: In the midst of every crisis lies great opportunity.
Even the nursery tale of the Three Little Pigs taught us that when people live in houses made of straw, and a great wind comes up to blown them down, it is an opportunity to build back better. So that the next time there’s a storm they remain safe and warm.
South Africa entered the pandemic teetering on the edge of economic disaster and psychological despair.
Unemployment, extreme poverty and inequality were not Covid inventions. (Nor were corruption or electricity blackouts.)
What Covid helped do, to some extent, was remove the blinkers from the eyes of those who didn’t want to see.
It forced the middle class to see the miserable lives many of our fellow South Africans still live due to our collective failures to create a more just and equal society 28 years after consigning apartheid to history.
And it forced our leaders to account for their leadership.
While exacting more misery on the fiscus, families and livelihoods, it helped focus our collective minds on what kind of society we’d actually like to be.
There were promising early signs, including the Community Action Networks twinning affluent and less affluent areas, and food gardens and feeding schemes that proliferated across the nation.
Now, the third Freedom Day in the presence of the pandemic is a good time to reflect how we have fared.
It is time enough to have got through the initial stage of the disaster, and see what’s left to build back a nation on sturdier legs of social, economic, environmental and spatial justice.
It is to our great detriment that malfeasance continues to define the South African story – even in the teeth of a disaster.
Instead of adopting a forward-looking stance, and focusing on developing the green shoots of promise, we are continuously dunked back into the sewers of the national narrative – looting and mismanagement – that has paralysed the nation’s leadership for decades.
Instead of using this period to conduct the necessary planning to implement a Basic Income Grant, we have tinkered about the edges with a temporary R350 emergency grant. As if people can flower without water…
Instead of our cities recognizing the growing need to house increasing numbers of desperate people, our cities are evolving into squalid tent cities.
We must not fall into the privileged trap of questioning whether there’s anything to celebrate on Freedom Day.
The triumph of relatively peacefully navigating our way out of 350 years of statutory white privilege was fundamental.
But, as we saw in last year’s elections, people are starting to turn their backs on traditionally powerful parties who are not seen to have been able to navigate us to better times.
When we look objectively at our performance under the extreme pressures of Covid we have to say that if there was an opportunity we have missed it.
The flooding in KZN reminds us to brace ourselves for increasingly disastrous climatic events, and as elected representatives we must set higher standards for ourselves to prevent any further deepening of the crisis of poverty and unsustainable living.
Media enquiries:
Brett Herron, GOOD: Secretary-General & Member of Parliament
Cell: 0825183264
Email: bretth@forgood.org.za
Samkelo Mgobozi, GOOD: Media Manager
Cell: 0792315977 (whatsapp)/0829684021 (calls)
Email: samm@forgood.org.za