The time has come to admit that we risk things falling apart. Yet it is somehow still necessary to state the obvious: South Africa, we are not okay. For too long we have thought that we were exceptional simply because we benefitted from the actions of a few exceptional men. No more.

21 years after we chose peace over war,

It is not okay that South Africans set human beings alight with tires around their necks and watch them scream in agony as they burn to death. Because they were born somewhere else. The same people who once fed and clothed our liberators, who were forced to leave everything behind and travel thousands of kilometers to seek a safe haven from genocidal wars, are carved to pieces with machetes and smashed to bits with bricks as soon as they cross our borders. How many more ‘others’ must be mutilated before we admit that the demon lives within?

21 years after we said no to violence,

It is not okay that all of us live in constant fear for our lives. Unable to fully enjoy the treasures of the most beautiful country on earth, we are like animals on a wide open savanna that still choose to live in cages. It is not okay that we are grateful when we ‘only’ get mugged, and that we all know that it is just a matter of time before hijacking, rape or murder shows up on the doorstep of someone we love. After we use our knife to eat the slaughtered cow’s inyama, we use that same blade to slaughter the farmer who fed us. We kill our children with stray bullets over a baggie of tik, and rape our women because we don’t like who they love.

21 years after we chose prosperity over misery,

It is not okay that 12 million people still live in dire poverty. For millions to still lack access to drinking water, houses and safe public transportation. It is not okay that the vast majority of those people are still black, and that the economic wealth of the country is still not being shared. But how could it be, when our public education system has been turned into a network of patronage to protect the incompetent? When math teachers at township schools can’t count, and language teachers can’t spell? The truth is that meaningful transformation will remain a pipe dream for as long as the majority of black learners risk their lives every day travelling on dangerous roads only to arrive at schools without textbooks or working toilets.

21 years after we chose light over darkness,

It is not okay that the most developed economy on the continent is unable to provide enough electricity to its people. Not because we lack the resources or the skills, but because the ANC government chose to sacrifice our infrastructure at the altar of racial obsession, corruption and sheer incompetence. How many South Africans will needlessly die as a result of this choice during the next few months as they are caught in the icy grip of winter without power? How many of our frail grandmothers and grandfathers will simply freeze to death as they try to stay warm under a pile of old newspapers? How many children will lose their lives in shack fires because they are forced to cook what little food they can scrape together on open flames?

21 years after we chose accountability over repression,

It is not okay that we have a government that allows its President to laugh in our faces after he steals our money. We have ignored our constitutional foundations – all of which are premised on coalition-building and power-sharing – and have instead handed a monopoly on power to a group of thieves who have shown nothing but contempt for the people. We have a government that fans the flames of xenophobia.

We live in a society infested with crime because we have a government that guns down its own people in broad daylight and then prosecutes no one. Our people are trapped in poverty because we have a government that has stolen their money to build themselves palaces. We are a society utterly devoid of accountability because we have a government that unleashes riot police on Members of Parliament. It is a society without a moral foundation, drifting leaderless into a sea of chaos.

21 years after we admitted the horrors of our past,

It is not okay that many white people are still apartheid apologists. It is not okay for you to mock the pain of others by singing Die Stem and parading around in your worn old SADF frocks. You may think it makes you look strong to stand around a braai telling your friends how dumb the ‘black government’ is, when all it actually does is reveal how pathetically insecure you truly are.

Every time you spew your bigotry, you are infecting the minds of those around you with your hate and spitting in the face of the countless black victims who chose to forgive. When everyone has gone home and the coals have died down, you lock yourself away in your personal prison, terrified that your hateful, brandy-fuelled rambles will echo into the ears of your fellow human beings on the other side of town. And that they will come for you in the night. It is time for the white community to take responsibility for rooting out this racism once and for all, and to start viewing their compatriots as equals capable of contributing to building a prosperous society.

21 years after we chose governors over rulers,

It is not okay that many in the black majority of this country choose to turn a blind eye on a brazenly corrupt, incompetent and murderous regime. If those apartheid dinosaurs are an underlying cause of the death and destruction we see all around us, then your racial nationalist ANC-denial is a proximate cause.

The unwillingness to admit that you have allowed yourselves to be co-opted by a party hell-bent on power and self-enrichment at the expense of everyone else has inflicted a tremendous amount of suffering not only on yourselves, but also on your fellow South Africans. Demographically speaking, everyone knows that black people will largely be responsible for determining the future fate of this country. It’s time to start acting like it by using your greatest weapon: vote differently.

It is necessary for us to admit that we – all of us – are not okay. That South African exceptionalism has always been a myth, and that what we are instead is a deeply troubled society. It is time to open our eyes to our real exceptionalism: the violence, inequality, racism and poverty that are the hallmarks of our beloved South Africa go beyond anything else that exists in the free world. If we continue in our failure to admit this, then we are only exceptional in our arrogance.

Leon Schreiber is a South African Visiting Doctoral Fellow at Princeton University and a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the Free University of Berlin. The views expressed are his own. This article first appeared on his blog at http://theschreiberei.wordpress.com/. He can be followed on Twitter here.