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EARLY morning on the Highveld. Yesterday’s punishing heat has burned away, and since you woke up at 04:00, there’s been a welcome breeze that cools today’s walk to catch a taxi.
And for once, your train is on time and leaves promptly.
You’re holding your big handbag on your lap, chatting to the woman next to you, when you are flung forward like a rag doll, your face hitting the frame of the seat opposite as noise explodes around you. Bodies are lying in the aisles, across the seats; you feel something dripping and realise that blood is pouring from your nose and mouth. And then the pain begins, stinging, deep and urgent, and tears shoot from your eyes…
I used to take the train in Cape Town daily, when I still lived and worked there, so the news story about the Metro rail crash in Germiston last week hit home. I can’t stop thinking about it, and imagining what it must have been like for the more than 200 people who were injured in this incident.
Metrorail said the train was ‘manually authorised' because of cable theft. A PRASA spokesperson says that the public cannot possibly understand the organisation’s frustration, as cables are stolen daily, replaced and then stolen again within days. (Why is there no dedicated policing of rail property?)
But we do have some insight into that frustration.
Repeated Telkom and Eskom related cable thefts have seen many of us endure lengthy communications or power outages
"'In 2004, about four percent of all outages were due to cable theft, and now it is 40%," Louis Pieterse, a director of Johannesburg's City Power utility company told AFP last year.
Cable theft crippled the City of Johannesburg’s data centre in Braamfontein late last year; in 2016, cable theft left Tshwane residents without water; a few years ago, cable theft caused a train derailment outside Pretoria, in which another 200 or so people were injured.
The total cost to the economy, back then, was estimated to be more than half a billion a year; I’d be willing to bet it has doubled since.
Eleven months ago, we were told that law enforcement officers had been given greater powers to deal with cable theft (and other metal theft); their extended powers gave them "the authority to conduct raids on second-hand goods dealers to ensure compliance and seal off errant businesses".
Has this made any noticeable impact? Not in my reading of the news. Oh, every now and then a big bust is made, as in the CoJ data centre case, and then politicians tell us again that some special unit is going to start tackling the situation.
Hmm. But many of us have totally lost faith in politicians – and we have excellent reason to have little faith in the police.
Late on the day of the Germiston crash, I was chatting to someone who had been told, fairly casually, by a police commander, that he knew police under his command were taking bribes. This was for a specific kind of crime rife in his particular area, but evidence, anecdotes and rumours indicate that bribery is commonplace among our police.
The effects of bribery
I can take a map and point to a string of areas where I’ve been told that bribery is ubiquitous. I’ve no doubt the sophisticated cable theft syndicates that plague the railways, Telkom and Eskom have a regular bribe delivery service.
The view from the most disadvantaged layer of society (which is where my interviewee works) is of a failed state. "Typically, the term means that the state has been rendered ineffective and is not able to enforce its laws uniformly or provide basic goods and services to its citizens because of (variously) high crime rates, insurgency, extreme political corruption, an impenetrable and ineffective bureaucracy, judicial ineffectiveness, military interference in politics, and cultural situations in which traditional leaders wield more power than the state over a certain area.” (Wikipedia)
There you go: high crime rates, extreme political corruption, an impenetrable and ineffective bureaucracy. That’s us.
And the most important fall-out, the biggest burden, of our failure to enforce laws and provide basic goods and services, lands on those least resilient. Cable theft hurts them most: they’re the people in the train crashes.
The middle and upper classes (quite rightly) complain like stink when their power is out or water goes off, but they can find ways of managing, at least for a while; and while they are the victims of crime, of course they are, they do at least get some action from the police, and can buy some protection from the security industry. The disadvantaged are the most vulnerable to criminals, and are their most common victims.
Our privilege, our ability to ‘make a plan’ and dodge some of the fallout, blinkers us. We are far closer to the abyss than perhaps we realise. The rampant and unchecked cable theft is a huge red flag of a society tilting into chaos.
So let’s clean out the Zupta nest, preferably with a high pressure hose, please. But the jet of water must reach every cranny: the corrupt, thieving councillors, the venal police tainting the whole police force (and obstructing effective policing of crimes like cable theft), the liars and crooks on every level.
Every day that they remain untouched risks, not just our future, but our Now.
- Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on Twitter.
