Something is wrong, very wrong

You know that numinous, uncomfortable feeling you get when you sense that something is very wrong?

It kind of ties a knot in your belly just below your breastbone and sometimes even hurts at your temples and between your shoulder blades. Your brows involuntarily furrow and your eyes widen as your pulse quickens.

And what’s most unnerving is that there doesn’t seem a rational explanation for your anxiety, your sense of foreboding, that gnawing empty dread.

Scientists believe it is not unlike the super-sense animals display just ahead of a disaster. Dogs, horses, rats and cats have been reported to get highly agitated before an earthquake. The 2004 Boxing Day tsunami claimed more than 230 000 lives, but there were very few reports of animal deaths. In fact, several reports mentioned monkeys in low-lying areas fleeing to higher ground before anyone even knew there had been an offshore earthquake. This phenomenon has been repeated dozens of times where natural disasters have occurred. Only pets and livestock, deprived of escape routes, have suffered.

That tingly, uncomfortable sensation we get without any real evidence that something is wrong could be a throwback to primeval days when we had to rely on all our senses to alert us to danger. While most of us tend to pooh-pooh such “superstitious nonsense”, overflowing with scientific hubris, people in the frontlines of danger — firemen, soldiers, policemen and even martial arts experts — actually practise to hone their “sixth sense” to give them even the slightest edge over danger or an opponent.

Reports of perfectly rational ordinary people sensing “something is wrong” are simply too numerous to dismiss. And scientists don’t dismiss them at all. In fact, the more they research and analyse and experiment, the greater becomes their conviction that there is credible evidence to support the view these sensations are real. We just don’t know exactly how they work.

And what is more, research supports the view that this sensory acuity is indeed higher in some people than in others. That shouldn’t be surprising either — many people have better-than-average hearing, vision, taste, touch and smell, just as there are millions with IQs higher than 140, the debatable but generally accepted cut-off point above which the terms “highly gifted” or “genius” are bandied about.

So where is all this blah-blah going, you ask.

Well, it’s actually me asking the question. I’m neither prescient, nor are my senses particularly acute (in fact, my sight is poor and my sense of smell in doubt despite giving up smoking a decade ago) and even if my IQ is 149, it doesn’t enter into this debate at all. I want to know if you get the feeling too — as I do — that something is going very, very wrong in South Africa?

Even better, are you able to put your finger (or fingers) on what it is?

Judging by comments in response to my most recent blog both here and internationally where it has been picked up and disseminated further, the answer is “Yes!”. Then take into consideration not one or two, but scores of vastly divergent media, and you instantly realise the perception is mounting inexorably that South Africa is headed in completely the wrong direction; that the Zuma regime is dragging us surreptitiously but deliberately and unmistakably down the disastrous spiral towards old style centrist, authoritarianism that characterised the USSR, Cuba under Fidel Castro, China under Mao Zedong and North Korea under Kim Jong Il.

And that would be a disaster for a country alive with possibility.

Zuma recently passed his 100 days in office and we have yet to see evidence of any of his pre-election promises.

Where is the greater transparency he promised?

Where is the plan to deal with the economic crisis?

Where are the 300 000 jobs from public works projects (instead he’s supporting calls for unpaid “volunteerism” when one-and-half-million unemployed people are so disillusioned they’ve given up even looking for a job any more)?

Where are the clampdowns on corruption, the uncompromising stands on service delivery, the improvements in public healthcare and education?

The only things I’ve seen are the increasing number of invasive, privacy-eroding and anti-freedom laws such as the obnoxious Rica (that goes along with the equally pointless and shameful Fica), platitudinous inanities and empty promises at public rallies, the appointment of a political stooge who dresses and behaves like Al Capone as portrayed so memorably by Robert De Niro in The Untouchables as chief of police (against the advice of the top brass of SAPS and every law and order expert in the country) and a mannequin in a suit at international meetings that wears the demeanour of haughty hubris, but comes across as the stupid kid in calculus class too embarrassed to admit he’s in the wrong place.

Does a head of state allow himself to be dragged by the nose through the dirt by his own comrades like Vavi and the certifiable Malema?

Does a president give his own supporters just cause to make a mockery of his office, burning, pillaging and trashing the streets where next year that president expect hundreds of thousands of tourists to walk?

Does “the man with plan” look as clueless as Zuma does in the latest edition of Newsweek?

As for his acolytes and disciples … well, between Foolish Malema, Out-of-Touch Tokyo and Jellybean Jeff they can’t even muster a plausible response to millions of rands that have gone walk-about again, service delivery riots and revelations about covert and clandestine arms supplies (yes, arms … again!) that have prompted global outrage and earned South Africa international opprobrium as a “rogue state”.

Fifteen years after we threw off the hideous mantle of polecat of the world, Zuma and his cabal will have us don it once again.

I, for one, find that deeply distressing and as we work to create a place to which the world will throng next year, as disastrous as any earthquake or tsunami. I have the unshakeable sensation that something is wrong, much worse in fact than even my recurring nightmares about this beautiful, beloved, blessed country.