If the constellations still kept watch over nations, South Africa would be marked with an omen so dark that the astrologers would refuse to chart it. The moon would turn her face, the sun would spit fire, and the stars would blink in pity.
Our socio-economic disaster is no test from the heavens, no script written by fate. It is the work of mortals – greedy, cunning, and catastrophically inept – who have taken the tools of state and used them not to build, but to plunder.
No prophet, saint or ancestor would claim this mess. The ancestors would close their ears to our prayers, the angels would refuse the mission, and the gods – if they ever walked among us – would flee.
For here, governance is not stewardship but sorcery of the darkest kind: a conjuring trick where policies appear in shining light and vanish into smoke before a single promise is kept.
The rot begins not in the streets but in the gilded sanctuaries of power – the council chambers and cabinet rooms where men and women gather to perform the ritual of policy-making, not to enact it.
Words are forged like holy relics, then abandoned to rust while the nation starves for action.
Our politics is a theatre of the absurd, played on a cosmic stage.
Local governments, which are meant to be the priests of service delivery, stagger like fallen angels through scandal after scandal – crippled by incompetence, drowning in self-interest, and hollowed out by governance so weak it could be swept away by a breath.
The results? Joblessness spreads like plague wind, poverty clings to communities like a second skin, and service delivery rots until it stinks.
Even when the visions are noble, they are treated like sacred scrolls locked in a temple – admired but never enacted.
Corruption is not the silent shame of the land – it is enthroned. Yep… corruption here is not the elephant in the room; it owns the deed to the building.
Political interference festers like a cursed wound. Nepotism is not a failing but a design principle.
It is written into the creed; the faithful are rewarded not for skill, but for bloodline and loyalty to the inner circle.
The public service, once imagined as the nation’s backbone, has melted into a boneless mass of flatterers, cowards and opportunists – held together only by the shared instinct and ability to dodge responsibility and to survive the next reshuffle.
The evidence of this blight is carved into the land itself: cratered roads like impact scars from a celestial bombardment, water systems collapsing as if struck by droughts sent by angry gods, and sanitation schemes abandoned like temples to forgotten deities.
Such ruin is not born overnight – it is cultivated over years by the unholy trinity of neglect, malpractice and greed.
And accountability? A phantom. “Consequence management” is uttered with the weight of an empty prayer. It is muttered like a spell that everyone knows has no power.
The guilty are never exorcised – merely transferred, recycled, or promoted, as though failure itself were a sacrament.
Now, with the brazenness of a false prophet, the government calls for a National Dialogue, promising it will “speed up reform”.
In truth, it will speed up nothing but the depletion of the catering budget.
The problem is not a lack of vision – it is the wilful refusal to act on it. A talk shop on how to repair a collapse caused by inaction is not salvation. It is a festival of hypocrisy.
Reform without accountability is incense in a hurricane – fragrant, futile, and gone in an instant.
South Africa’s tragedy is not written in the stars. It is written in the handshakes of liars, in the signatures of looters, and in the smirk of the man who knows he will never face consequences.
This nation is a republic where governance is a masquerade, policy is theatre, and the public trust is just another offering on the altar of self-enrichment.
Until the culture of impunity is ripped out root and branch, until the temple of governance is rebuilt on competence and integrity – and the unfit driven from its gates – no prophet, no prayer, and no celestial intervention will save us.
South Africa is not drifting into darkness. It is being dragged there, chained hand and foot, by the very custodians sworn to keep it in the light.
• Khumalo is a freelance journalist and columnist
