OUT TO LUNCH
The collapse of South Africa’s infrastructure under ANC rule is truly frightening. And it’s not just a matter of the ANC ‘cadres’ filling their pockets and buying luxury cars at the taxpayer’s expense. It’s far more mundane than that. Remember when we had a thing called the Post Office? The place where your reminder would appear before you had to cough up the bucks and renew your car license disc? Or the place where your birthday cards and Christmas cards might turn up before the day. Well, that’s all a happy memory because these days we have nothing even approaching a first world postal service.
When I arrived in the UK a couple of years ago on holiday I realised I had brought the wrong charger for my digital camera. So I went online and ordered a replacement which arrived by first class post the following morning. Simple, cheap and efficient.
When I try and explain to my extended family that the reason we don’t send them birthday or Christmas cards is not because we are too mean spirited but because we simply don’t have the first world luxury of a functioning post office.
Equally pointless is trying to explain to overseas friends and relatives that anything they sent us would have been torn open in the hope of finding cash or something to steal and sell. The last parcel that arrived intact to me was a birthday present of a T-shirt from my sister in the UK. There was a catch however…. I had to pay R783 import duty on a birthday present costing less than a quarter of that amount. Since it had taken three months to get here I didn’t want to seem ungrateful so grudgingly paid up.
Despite the valiant attempts of Mark Barnes to get the Post Office up and running as a commercial enterprise it has turned out to be a lamentable failure. I know Mark from my financial market days and he is as solid and a patriotic citizen as you could hope to meet and had all the management skills to do the job but eventually even he realized that in a state which encourages entitlement over effort he was backing a lame horse. Why do we even pretend to still have a postal system when it’s quite clear we don’t?