Over Paying
You can tell who the locals are from their shoes. There’s a layer of dust on all of them and some have muddy watermarks from last week. They’re still amongst the most expensive footwear you’re likely to see but the evidence of negotiating the muddy, waterlogged patches in the village is patent. The handful of visitors are easy to spot. They’re in flip flops and you can’t blame them, it’s a seaside holiday village after all. You can see them gawking at the devastation from the flooding. There’s mountains of reddish soil all over the promenade. The wastewater plant is wrecked and the famous traffic circle is now just a huge sinkhole. The usually pretty village is in a bit of a state.
Heading north, it looks almost okay until you reach the tidal pool area and see the ancient sand dune that has broken open and slid down the hill. Bringing with it apartments and houses. From there on the promenade is reduced to a narrow steeply sanbanked path that ends in what used to be a stable sand dune. There’s drone footage showing another giant slash in the ancient dune just further north at the turning circle. The same footage shows the top of the hill behind the village, which up until recently was covered in Natal coastal forest. It is now bare. It’s that Joni Mitchell tune again; the forest was cut down to put up a parking lot.
But I’ll leave the matter of cutting down forests to build malls to the experts.
Checking in online, there’s been some back and forth about the April 2022 Durban floods. An NGO posted about connecting the floods to climate change. More than a few people replied and told them to STFU. Allegedly Durban in particular and KZN in general, floods. It’s happened since before Pa was dropped on his head and making a hoo-ha about this flood being related to climate change is baloney. For a lot of people, the flood itself, while traumatic in so many ways, is less worrying than the city’s emergency response abilities.
One wrote about how in previous KZN floods, helicopters from the army, the police, disaster & emergency services, and even private aircraft were roped in to pluck people from the flood. The writer went on to say that; what was different this time round, was that almost all the helicopters in the police, army and other government owned entities were being used by provincial and local politicians as their personal transport. They could not be called into service to do duty saving people from the flood. Whole families were swept away and drowned and over four-hundred people (and counting) lost their lives in the KZN floods.
Other folk got into the early warning systems failure. According to them, the ability or formal systems to observe, track, report and predict potential natural disasters is lacking in the holy land. They didn’t say it quite like that on Twitter but that was they meant. Yet others found their voice in expressing concerns about what would happen to the disaster relief money that was soon to flow down from the national treasury for rebuilding costs. This is allegedly going to be more than a billion in local currency. There’s concern that local, provincial and national politicians and their allies in the business sector will steal all this money. The concern is real. A whole lot of COVID relief money went missing in the holy land.
Sometimes I wonder if the missing trillions are like socks. If somewhere out there, there’s a field of socks just waiting for their matching pair to turn up and be whole again. I quickly pour cold rainwater from the bucket over my head and remind myself to stop dreaming while the sun is still out.
In real terms, many people in this city of over 3 million have had no regular water or electricity supply for over 10 days now. Worse still, there’s little hope and even less faith in the duly elected city, provincial and national government officials to attend to the situation. Not to be defeated by venal politicians and their price-gouging allies in business; the locals are getting on with it. Not as quickly as some might have wished for — but it’s happening. A community water tank has been set up and it is regularly topped up with a light brown version of otherwise potable water. For a village that’s gone ten days with no water and zero emergency response, this is heaven sent.
In other parts of KZN, people are taking on as much as they can to clean up and rebuild; with or without the support of local, provincial and national politicians. While the hope this embodies is to be celebrated; it’s vital not to lose sight of the actual social contract that’s been broken. In the holy land, we elect people to go to local, provincial and national governments to serve our interests. They duly ignore that. We then pick up (and fund) the broken pieces from our own pockets. That looks a lot like paying twice and if I’ve learnt anything about the locals in the past year of living here, it’s that they hate overpaying for anything. I also learnt that they regularly overpay for overhyped stuff they don’t need but that’s a blog for when there’s a regular supply of both electricity and water in the village.
Over Paying is a note-to-self about the mental health costs of our misanthropic governments, the world over.
© Jesh Baker 2022
