JOHANNESBURG - There is a sense in which the role of government is meant to protect its citizens from the things that go bump in the night.
It is the singular and pinnacle instrument that a nation is meant to look to, for the ultimate protection against the challenges of being human.
The government is supposedly where the best of us are consolidated, with all the highest virtues of humanity. So, a lack of faith in government is a critical indictment.
It keeps me up at night to look around and see such despondency and distrust in those meant to be the custodians of the state.
To be met, in every conversation, with something akin to: “Don’t worry, you’re still young. You’ll learn, the more things change the more they stay the same.”
I have heard this line from all kinds of people, from all walks of life, and from people in various stations in life. More people will express this than not, and this, for me, is worse than any monster in the closet or bogeyman.
If a nation cannot engender hope in its youth, then, I fear, what is on the horizon looms darker than the worst of the seven biblical plagues.
I think this speaks of a nation that is broken beyond recognition, or one that is violently bubbling, the eruption of which will either spell unspeakable horrors for its people or give birth to something new.
Sadly, new is not always better, and looking at history, I fear the cost, typically in blood, of the eruption.
The tragedy is that the pudding is pregnant with proof:
Someone’s child, brother, sister, uncle, aunt, father, or mother is high, hungry, cold, or dead in the street.
Mothers taking their own children’s lives; men doing unspeakable things to infants, children, women, and each other; communities looking the other way with detachment; leaders drenching their souls with the profits of these horrors, and finally; there is nowhere for us to cry, no one to hear us, and no one to stand with or for us when our knees buckle with rightful hopelessness.
I simply do not want to raise a child in this world. I'm scared to fall in love. To dream. To believe. And worst of all, I’m scared to hope.
This… It keeps me up at night.
- by Smangaliso Mkhuma
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