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PEOPLE who work from home really should have a bell or even an intercom at their gate, I think; and one of these days I’ll install one. I’ve been promising myself this little luxury for – oh, 10 years?
Meanwhile, we do just fine with the dogs as alarms. The other day they alerted us to a delivery: the large luxury diary, the slim pocket version and the calendar that my husband orders every year, knowing full well that only the pocket diary will get any real use.
The calendar will lie on the dining room table till someone slides it behind the couch to make way for guests, and there it will stay till we rediscover it sometime in March.
But it’s my husband’s way of making an annual contribution to an NGO that works for the aged. It’s not much, but I’m sure it will be well used.
It is needed now more than ever before. I’m constantly hearing of NGOs slipping under the waves – and not minor, unheard of local ones, either. The Tshwaraneng Legal Advocacy Centre, source of invaluable info about rape issues in particular, recently put up red flags: it has chopped its staff in half and anticipates going under if a white knight (or a platoon of white knights) is not found.
Meanwhile, it appears that South Africa’s Holy Terror, the South African Revenue Service, is likely to fall short on collection by something like R3bn. Which means there’s less money to be dipped into to meet social needs.
And we do have to meet social needs at some basic level, as I was reminded at a recent FrontFoot event in Sandton, addressed by Justice Malala and Clem Sunter, both of whom spoke about the state of our nation.
Our real unemployment rate is in the high 30 percents, says Sunter, and our anticipated growth rate for the foreseeable future is under 3%. These two factors are a prescription for horror: young people leaving school and tertiary institutions today are quite likely never to find work.
That factor, coupled with deep dissatisfactions and ready access to online networks, spells ‘Arab Spring’ to Sunter and other pundits like Moeletsi Mbeki.
Sometimes I think that NGOs, like the Muslim food parcel scheme that has saved so many desperate families from severe hunger, and social grants, small as they are, are all that stand between us and a bloody revolution.
A few months ago I was doing a story and when I returned from my trip, my husband and I went out to eat. As one does; normal middle class thing. But the shopping mall we were in suddenly became too much for me: I had to get away from the glitz and bling. It’s not the first time I’ve reacted like this.
It’s a surreal feeling to come from harsh, arid poverty and find yourself being deep-fried in wealth. It gives me, perhaps, a more immediate and stark perspective on the twin realities of our country than the average commuter is able to have.
If you don’t leave the gated suburbs behind you and venture into the ‘other’ nation, you really can’t begin to understand how many whirling worlds stand between us.
And yet they don’t really stand between us. We may be able to ignore the poor, but they’re not ignoring us. Because even in the most informal settlement I’ve been in, there’s a family with a TV that they can power with a car battery, and the neighbours gather round of an evening to watch Scandal and Generations.
They see the clothes, the cars, the furniture, the whiskey. I’ve never wondered why crime is so violent in this country: if I went to bed hungry, sleeping four to a mattress, and I saw that level of wealth just up the road, I’d feel hate and rage and desire, too.
That’s why, as Sunter points out, each of us who live lives of privilege in this country have an obligation to do corporate or individual social responsibility. Not just because it’s nice to do and makes you feel good about yourself, but also because we need to safeguard our lives and our children’s lives.
Because if you’re doing comfortably in South Africa today, chances are you did not get there entirely on your own. You used existing infrastructure and institutions that others built, your parents helped, you got a bursary…
“I personally think that society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I've earned. If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru or someplace, you find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil...
I work in a market system that happens to reward what I do very well - disproportionately well... I do think that when you're treated enormously well by this market system, where in effect the market system showers the ability to buy goods and services on you because of some peculiar talent… society has a big claim on that.” (Warren Buffett)
If all of us who live reasonably comfortable lives supported interventions that stave off hunger and misery for the very poor, we could start to shape a society that is safe for all of us to live in.
- Fin24
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own.
Meanwhile, we do just fine with the dogs as alarms. The other day they alerted us to a delivery: the large luxury diary, the slim pocket version and the calendar that my husband orders every year, knowing full well that only the pocket diary will get any real use.
The calendar will lie on the dining room table till someone slides it behind the couch to make way for guests, and there it will stay till we rediscover it sometime in March.
But it’s my husband’s way of making an annual contribution to an NGO that works for the aged. It’s not much, but I’m sure it will be well used.
It is needed now more than ever before. I’m constantly hearing of NGOs slipping under the waves – and not minor, unheard of local ones, either. The Tshwaraneng Legal Advocacy Centre, source of invaluable info about rape issues in particular, recently put up red flags: it has chopped its staff in half and anticipates going under if a white knight (or a platoon of white knights) is not found.
Meanwhile, it appears that South Africa’s Holy Terror, the South African Revenue Service, is likely to fall short on collection by something like R3bn. Which means there’s less money to be dipped into to meet social needs.
And we do have to meet social needs at some basic level, as I was reminded at a recent FrontFoot event in Sandton, addressed by Justice Malala and Clem Sunter, both of whom spoke about the state of our nation.
Our real unemployment rate is in the high 30 percents, says Sunter, and our anticipated growth rate for the foreseeable future is under 3%. These two factors are a prescription for horror: young people leaving school and tertiary institutions today are quite likely never to find work.
That factor, coupled with deep dissatisfactions and ready access to online networks, spells ‘Arab Spring’ to Sunter and other pundits like Moeletsi Mbeki.
Sometimes I think that NGOs, like the Muslim food parcel scheme that has saved so many desperate families from severe hunger, and social grants, small as they are, are all that stand between us and a bloody revolution.
A few months ago I was doing a story and when I returned from my trip, my husband and I went out to eat. As one does; normal middle class thing. But the shopping mall we were in suddenly became too much for me: I had to get away from the glitz and bling. It’s not the first time I’ve reacted like this.
It’s a surreal feeling to come from harsh, arid poverty and find yourself being deep-fried in wealth. It gives me, perhaps, a more immediate and stark perspective on the twin realities of our country than the average commuter is able to have.
If you don’t leave the gated suburbs behind you and venture into the ‘other’ nation, you really can’t begin to understand how many whirling worlds stand between us.
And yet they don’t really stand between us. We may be able to ignore the poor, but they’re not ignoring us. Because even in the most informal settlement I’ve been in, there’s a family with a TV that they can power with a car battery, and the neighbours gather round of an evening to watch Scandal and Generations.
They see the clothes, the cars, the furniture, the whiskey. I’ve never wondered why crime is so violent in this country: if I went to bed hungry, sleeping four to a mattress, and I saw that level of wealth just up the road, I’d feel hate and rage and desire, too.
That’s why, as Sunter points out, each of us who live lives of privilege in this country have an obligation to do corporate or individual social responsibility. Not just because it’s nice to do and makes you feel good about yourself, but also because we need to safeguard our lives and our children’s lives.
Because if you’re doing comfortably in South Africa today, chances are you did not get there entirely on your own. You used existing infrastructure and institutions that others built, your parents helped, you got a bursary…
“I personally think that society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I've earned. If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru or someplace, you find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil...
I work in a market system that happens to reward what I do very well - disproportionately well... I do think that when you're treated enormously well by this market system, where in effect the market system showers the ability to buy goods and services on you because of some peculiar talent… society has a big claim on that.” (Warren Buffett)
If all of us who live reasonably comfortable lives supported interventions that stave off hunger and misery for the very poor, we could start to shape a society that is safe for all of us to live in.
- Fin24
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own.
