Sine 🇿🇦

It's important for South Africans to know that their leaders have no problem with regression and decline into the gutter. As long as they remain in power, like their Zimbabwean counterparts, they will be content, even if they rule over ashes. They have no problem with big cities like Johannesburg losing their world-class standards: water systems with efficient reservoirs, treatment plants and a complete water network. The Third World begins the exact moment a society alters its daily life to accommodate the failure of the state, rather than forcing the state to fix the failure. It is defined by what the people learn to live with. When a community accepts that municipal water will never run from the tap, and instead celebrates a plastic bulk water storage tank as a luxury, that is the Third World mindset. When citizens buy private generators, dig private boreholes, hire private security and pay private medical bills, all while continuing to pay taxes to a corrupt ruling elite, they are actively financing a Third World reality. The infrastructure collapses because the public's threshold for outrage has collapsed. Mediocrity becomes the national baseline. Rhodesia had clean running water from its taps. Later the water was no longer clean, and eventually it was absent, so people reverted to wells and boreholes. These alternatives are not innovation or smart solutions. They are a decline into mediocrity. Cities are not villages, and service delivery standards must remain standards.