From Comfort; To Discomfort

People always say Joburgers like to complain, about traffic, about work, about almost anything and everything. But, if you live in Johannesburg, you’d probably notice changes taking place around you. Changes… not always for the better. These days, it’s hard to tell when is peak/off-peak traffic, because whenever you’re on the road the traffic just seems endless; then there’re the numerous pot-holes, which are badly “patched” up; or the digging of “trenches” on random streets. That’s just on the roads, not to mention, there are still the endless day-to-day things to worry about: high fuel price, high interest rates, and high inflation rates, also not to forget higher electricity cost. All of these means a trip to the grocery store could give you a heart attack.

This got me thinking about Comfort and Discomfort. Up until now, we (middle- to upper-class population) have been in pretty comfortable position. We could afford the big houses, nice/fast cars, reasonable standard of living. In fact, for the majority of Africa, South Africa can be considered as the Europe of Africa. Although we may not have it all (compared to the developed countries in the world), but we pretty much have everything the rest of Africa didn’t have. People tend to be happy with what he/she already have, and then aspire to have more. But the moment you take away what they have accustomed to, it’s all hell break loose… this is not how it used to be… I want what I used to have…life was so much better in the old days… remember when you can get a lollipop with 50_C… Hence in Service Marketing theory: it’s easy to meet/expectation customers’ expectations by giving them value-add (free magazines, peanuts, etc.), but once you take that away customers become unhappy, because it has become the standard, and you’re falling behind expectations.

Falling short of the standard doesn’t happen overnight. It starts with something small, accumulates over time, and one day, bursts out like a broken pipe. For years, Government has fall short of service delivery, it busies itself with plans for “transformation”. But in actual fact, it got rid off the people with the knowledge, and replaced them with unqualified people, all in the name of transformation. I do not object to the idea of transformation, but one cannot sacrifice quality for the sake of transformation. Now, we not only have unqualified public servants, they are also illiterate! Majority of our public servants, people whose purpose is to run the systems of the country only have Primary or Secondary education. It seems as if though, you do badly in school, don’t worry, you’ll get a job in Government, and you can make lots of money – corruption. So we are faced with small cracks that have formed over the years, and it has now caused part of the wall to collapse. Yet, we are still busy arguing that it is the people that built the wall who did a poor job; we should get the cousin of the cousin to try and paint the wall; we are not doing so bad the wall is still standing and it is still better than the other people’s walls. What we fail to realise is that although other people’s walls are not as good as ours, they are busy building it, piece by piece.

When will we wake up from the dream that South Africa is still the best in Africa, and realise that Africa is slowly going to leave us behind?

From comfort; to discomfort – maybe it is exactly what we need to make us see the reality. Will the discomfort poke us in the ribs so much that we will stand up and act? Or will we keep on sitting under the Baobab tree and complain about the unfairness in the world?