Johannesburg - It’s not just the protests in the streets, but the blatant burglary from fuel prices.
The cost of living recklessly drives us to different places – this is how the poor remain so, always rope walking on stilts.
It takes them oceans away from significance, closer to their recurring fear of the total nothingness of death.
It is the cost of living to you, but of dying to live, for them.
With rising food prices, power cuts, and galloping inflation, South Africa is sinking into these faraway oceans of destitution.
Still far removed from the restitution of land seized from black bodies who are now trapped in a cycle of poverty, dismayed by the legacy of socio-economic injustice – they were pushed off land to make way for the mechanised farms.
The cost of living drives us to different places; it takes the middle class on a joyless ride to depression, with thoughts about the future threatening to engulf them in a cloak of anxiety.
It is becoming heavier to think about the future; Mother Nature is commanding us to live for the moment, to shed a load from our thoughts, perhaps to cushion the real impact of the economic instability.
We have been peering from under the thumb of an elite white minority in the most economically unequal country in the world.
These calluses in our hands hold fewer assets, we have fewer skills, earn lower wages, and remain more likely to be unemployed.
It’s not just the protests in the streets, but the lack of service delivery that precedes them.
The lungs of democracy have not been successful in breathing transformation through the country, we are halting into sand dunes overflowing with mirages – everything is not as it seems, politicians are practising sleight of hand while South Africa enters a worsening global economic environment.
We have been bending light rays to produce displaced objects since our government’s first batch of repeat promises.
It is unfortunate that words are nothing but scrambled alphabets when no action backs them – prioritising adequate education, transformation, and tackling poverty, unemployment and inequality are merely pipe dreams when corruption is aiding the cost of living in painting us into a corner of fanciful schemes.
This is how we tiptoe closer to a failed state.
You can plant them in the same soil, and water them with the same rain, but salary and inflation seeds will not grow at the same rate.
We are not just protesting in the streets, you can hear the sorrow in our chants, marred by rage; the mortal agony in our symphony, our souls are pleading; the synchronised stomping when we march, grounding the earth, absorbing thermal energy and reacquainting ourselves with the land of our foremothers.
We are not just protesting, you can hear the wind from the friction of our bodies, slow dancing with burning tyres, blowing puffs of smoke signals – summoning the wrath of our forefathers and embodying it in our waking life, searching, sometimes finding choices in chaos.