An elderly woman, on one Sunday morning not so long ago, threw her hands up in the air, and rhetorically asked: “What has our world come to, when so many of our youth have developed a huge tolerance to heavy boozing, day after day.”
In her own words, she said, “lafa izwe lawo bawo”, which when translated, depending on the context, relates to an expression that decries a particular unpleasant behaviour or action by members of society.
The old lady was disturbed by a group of young boys and girls, apparently from one of the taverns in Thokoza, continuing with their binge drinking through the streets of the township, with their ngudus or 750ml bottle of beers, in hand, as they merrily sung their way to wherever they were headed. And, sadly, also to an uncertain future of alcoholism, listlessness and a lifetime of joblessness.
Lafa elihle Kakhulu, the old lady repeated the desolate remark, an expression also found in Alan Paton’s novel, Cry, the Beloved Country. In this novel, Paton decries social and political injustice in apartheid South Africa, and the uncertain future of a black child under that racist regime.
Yet, sadly, the journey to nowhere, and possibly to an uncertain future, inexorably continues, 30 years after our democracy – an uncertain future which will for the young people include unemployment – and a generational inheritance of poverty, already a blight in black life in the new SA.
I was driving into a churchyard to say Mass in an Anglican church where I am a priest when I experienced this drama unfolding. Some of the boys and girls among the group, inebriated as they were, greeted me with joy, and excitement: “Good morning, Father. Pray for us.”
Some, among them, I recognised as having been altar servers at some point in their lives, when they were much younger. Now they are in their early 20s, or younger, gripped by the iNgudu culture – and if there is no intervention, a likelihood drag to alcoholism.
My mind was made up. My text for the homily to be preached on the day would have to be altered. The words of desolation I heard from the old lady had to be shared with the faithful. The need to create our heaven, here on Earth, and not elsewhere, had come.
We can never be a church that preaches an afterlife experience. Better life must be experienced today, and so we need to tackle social decay of social life brought about by loss of hope among the youth, in turn, brought about by the spiking youth unemployment.
What the future holds for the youth after the upcoming national and provincial elections, we can never know.
But we know that the iNgudu culture of hopelessness expressed through binge drinking is in part a product of a political leadership that appears not to care about the wellbeing of society, and by extension, of the spiking youth unemployment.
The government has not been focused on creating a conducive environment for the young people of this country. All that the young people know, for the good part of the 30 years of democracy, are empty promises of a distant “better life” promised to come, or might be on its way”, and yet it never reaches them.
The creation of large-scale employment opportunities is the way to go. Yet the country has been going through a de-industrialisation trajectory that has put paid to all hopes of young people ever finding gainful employment.
Millions of young people swell the ranks of the unemployed, and many could easily resort to a life of crime, if no solution is found to arrest the spiking unemployment rate.
“iNgudu drinking culture” is found in almost every black township, or a black village. South Africa is slipping into lawlessness and anarchy in which the rule of law no longer matters.
Young South Africans are losing hope in democracy.
The words of an elderly woman are instructive: “Lafa elihle Kakhulu, or Cry, the Beloved Country; lafa izwe lawo bawo.
These words, expressed by an elderly woman, are words of sadness and desperation, and by a woman who could not countenance why young boys, on a Sunday morning, before 9am, were already sauntering, unashamedly with their ngudus, in the streets of Thokoza, Ekurhuleni, visibly staggering, or unsteady on their feet, because of inebriation.
Those who will be entrusted to run the country after the May 29 general elections have an onerous task ahead of them which is how they will run a new government which is to restore diminishing hope among millions of unemployed young people.
- Mdhlela is the acting news editor of Sunday World, an Anglican priest and former editor of the South African Human Rights Commission journals
