We have two needs that are so basis that we even grant them to animals: food and shelter. We need food for ourselves and our children, and a warm place where we cannot be killed in our sleep.
There are numerous other accepted human rights. Even more numerous are the expectations of citizens for which the government accepts responsibility when it collects taxes from them.
But it is a sigh of abject failure of government, when even these two basic needs go unfulfilled, when millions go hungry and have no housing at all.
When officials steal the money and live on the fact of the land, flaunting their privileged position by buying expensive cars and several palatial homes, it is downright shameful, especially if they have been elected in good faith by the poor.
Am I talking about South Africa? Is this another attack on our self-enriching government – indeed it is and we see it daily on how voters are being wooed by the political parties in the country to keep on voting for them.
They are promising them each in a different way, protection against exploitation by the one company that supplies a basic need, energy.
Nobody seems surprised that the leaders of the mother of democracy promises to protect their voters against those they must pay if they want to prepare food and keep warm. We don’t seem to have very high expectations of our democracy and that’s shouldn’t be.