South Africa - Cape Town - A mother and her two young kids walk with empty bottles and a wheelie bin to go fetch water from another house which is approximetly 1km away from where they are staying. People living on state-owned farm Mesco are now living without water or electricity on the farm. A contractor who delivers water to the people was allegedly not paid by government. In 2019 close to 300 people including children and the elderly, were evicted from Klein Akker farm in Kraaifontein and left destitute. The landowner had successfully initiated eviction proceedings because it had plans to develop the land into an industrial or semi-industrial property. After the families had slept on the side of the road for a few days, Deputy Minister of Rural Development, Mncebici Skwatsa, intervened and they were relocated to Mesco, an abandoned state-owned farm. Picture: Henk Kruger/African News Agency (ANA)
My word for this week is anecdotal. It refers to any account of an event, experience or opinion that is not necessarily true or reliable, because it is based on personal accounts rather than facts or research.
Synonyms are “informal, unreliable, based on hearsay, unscientific”. When the big hitters enter the arena, they use synonyms like “qualitative, circumstantial, unempirical, unsystematic, informal and random”.
It doesn’t follow that all discourse must follow strict academic and cerebral formulations to achieve validity. One can rely on human experience, which is my justification for a column that could be said to be entirely anecdotal.
I read a report of a woman who was on her way home with her young daughter along Voortrekker Road in Maitland. That was at three in the morning. Somehow, the child fell into a drain that had no cover.
It took police divers and other tactical personnel two days to recover the body. This is my information on a tragic event.
Questions cascade into my angling mind, asking why the woman was out at that time of the day/night. Why was there no cover on the drain, or, if there wasn’t a cover, why was there no warning or alternate neutralisation of a fatal scenario?
This is not the first time we have lost a child younger than 10 to the maws of plain, unadulterated negligence or lack of respect for human life.
I saw a man pushing a brand-new supermarket trolley in a busy road in Bellville. The cart contained scrap cardboard, tin cans and rolls of wire. He would, no doubt, exchange it for money and feed his children. On the same day, I saw another citizen of Bellville dragging a wheelie-bin.
This is council property, assigned to ratepayers who fill it with domestic offal for the council to collect every week. I don’t know what he had in the wheelie-bin. What struck me was that he didn’t look like a ratepayer on his way to service this utility or have it replaced for some reason.
All I could wonder was why he, like the trolley-cart pusher, was not questioned or held to account for a reasonably fair question.
Do I hear the mumbling accusations of police-state, draconian, old days, apartheid mentality and so forth waiting to wash me into the ocean of disdain? Am I going to be crucified because I see in the anecdotal accounts, open evidence of the toothless agencies that could easily make our country great again if only at the level of “please explain”?
Has the word “accountability” lost all semblance of meaning, leaving us with people who populate any free space, those who supplement the municipal cleaning facility by sorting through your dirt-bin just before the official collectors arrive?
A man, who has been a lifelong member of the ANC, jumps ship and supports another party. It becomes national news, like a pandemic or national food poisoning.
This is one individual going public on his loss of faith with the agency of governance, who then triggers a brouhaha of castigation, and does a U-turn to return to the fold of the untouchables called the ruling party. He gets a second bite at the cherry.
Perhaps I should stop quoting anecdotally acquired truths that display openly and sadly how our beautiful country has gone from racist hell hole to sub-third country status where anybody does as they please.
Can we all collectively realise that there are hundreds of thousands of children on summer holiday who will be unprotected or cared for in the country of their birth or adoption?
We utter our despair at the joy we should be feeling at being alive, and how it is mindlessly destroyed by the scavenger politicians.
And will I be silenced by the accusation that my concerns are merely anecdotal? Or worse, mere semantics? I close on an anecdotal injunction to all my fellow-countrymen in this significant (for me) religious time: Joy to the world. Peace on Earth.
Merry Christmas, y’all!
* Alex Tabisher.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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