Could this be my last blog?

I have a T-shirt brought back from the Newseum in Washington, DC, that reads: “Trust me, I am a reporter”.

It’s the one I am wearing in this month’s issue of Empire, the boldest and most adventurous and fecund new magazine to hit South Africa’s bookshelves in years. After so long we have a magazine with the intestinal and testicular fortitude to tackle the really tough issues head-on, armed only with the penmanship of the best in journalism.

Legendary hard-arse newshound Rian Malan, the Chuck Norris of South African journalists, wrote the article on “race and resentment in South Africa’s newsrooms” — about my failed attempt to drag the Sowetan along the path of quality without excuses, the journalistic code less travelled in South Africa today.

The T-shirt was given to me by one of the toughest, hardest-working and bravest people I’ve ever had the honour to meet — Zane Wilson, founder and still CEO of the South African Depression and Anxiety Group, Africa’s biggest and most successful mental-health NGO.

Journalism and, more accurately, freedom of expression are under serious threat in South Africa. The biggest threat comes from the ruling ANC government.

I was asked, in all seriousness, by an al-Jazeera freelancer not so long ago how long I thought it would be before South Africa went the way of Zimbabwe. I was stunned. I thought that kind of talk had died a quiet death.

But it seems that outside of our chakalaka cocoon there are other perceptions sprouting. Maybe the non-African world sees spooks like the Nats saw the rooi gevaar behind every bush.

Then again, you see Kenya and Chad and the DRC and the disbanding of the Scorpions and the ANC campaign for media tribunals and asinine “pledges of allegiance” that conjure images of Leni Riefenstahl documentaries and fresh-faced Aryan schoolkids. And I wonder.

Zuma Simpson genuinely scares the crap out of me. His interview on BBC was a sitcom and would have been genuinely hilarious if it didn’t remind us all so much of Idi Amin, the last king of Scotland. Like an arrogant puppy overwhelmed by the noise of his own yapping, Showerhead has withdrawn most of his idiotic charges against the media and slunk away at the sight of his shadow.

But it is a shadow that is looming increasingly menacing over our future.

This week, Chunky Charlie Nqakula’s obsequiousness in disbanding the most successful crime-fighting outfit this nation has ever had is indicative of the Zulu might under Zuma and the lack of testicular fortitude or plain common sense in the rest of the ANC. That does not bode well for the rule of law in South Africa.

And while our president-in-waiting (but waiting for the oath of allegiance of office, or that he will tell the truth in court?) is mooning in Mauritius, 33 000 e.tv viewers condemned the disbanding of the Scorpions, which he orchestrated, and the Independent Directorate of Complaints confirmed that more than 800 cops in KwaZulu-Natal alone were under investigation.

Little wonder that more and more people are seriously whispering war-talk of the Shell House kind pre-1994. The idle, jobless young warriors in Zululand and Pondoland are pawing the ground. And the Isuzu bakkies that hunted arms caches in post-war Mozambique are said to be scouring remote regions of KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape with fervour.

And when one sees how increasingly thin the veneer of law and order has become with schoolboys shooting up townships, drunken white louts firing on black pub-crawlers and gangs of black skollies hunting white farmers in the Northern Cape, Anthony Altbeker’s book A Country at War With Itself seems a euphemistic what-if scenario.

Thank God we have courageous religious leaders spearheading the bill of responsibilities to counter-balance the Bill of Rights. It has clearly never occurred to the ANC that rights without responsibilities lead to the kind of out-of-control corruption that permeates every level of government. It was this kind of amoral megalomania that gave Mad Bob the platform from which to launch his dictatorship, and which underpinned the craven response from Thabo the Timid.

Call me alarmist, sensationalist, even racist (if you’re that stupid), but then seriously ask yourself how effective our national intelligence capacity is; how effective our police “service” is; how safe you feel at night, every night; how much confidence Thabo instilled last week; and why the cream of our intelligentsia is leaving.

Just listen to the mindless mouthings of our rulers from Alec to Charles to Naledi to Moosa (skip Manto, that’s just plain airhead stuff) to the perpetually perplexed Geraldine who doesn’t even know how many people there are in her department or whether her computers are working lekker.

Can you seriously trust these buffoons? They are the ones Bill Cosby would place in “slow class”, the experiments evolution filed in the bottom drawer or left on the island of Dr Moreau. If you knew yours was the winning Lotto ticket, would you ask one of them to cash it for you?

Fellow TL blogger Steve Vosloo speaks of the Matthew Effect in education, based on Matthew’s Gospel 25:29:

“For to everyone who has, more shall be given, and he will have an abundance;
but from the one who does not have, even what he does have shall be taken away.”

The ANC overlords fall into the latter category when it comes to brain matter.

The problem is that when it comes to brawn … well, we see what they’re doing to the Scorpions, state health, our roads, our energy, our water supplies, our food inflation, our credit rating and, yes, what they want to do to our media. When looked at in that light, maybe Zimbabwe is just a short swim away.

There is a grave and growing unease in South Africa, ironically sparked by rubbing together the Polokwane pantomime and the energy crisis. The faithful sheeple’s lack of faith in the empty promises of the ANC was translated into grasping at a ridiculous straw — a man of low moral stature infatuated with automatic weapons but who shouted a good shout and danced a nifty shuffle. The same thing has happened before — when an equally curious little Austrian corporal mesmerised a demoralised Germany with power-to-the-people talk.

We are living in dangerous times — even that lonely little man in Parliament last week inadvertently alluded to this in his misguided quotation from A Tale of Two Cities. People tell me they can actually feel the tension, the razor-wire taut aggro in the air, when they arrive at OR Tambo. I felt it in December on returning from the green Kalahari. I feel it now in shopping malls and steakhouses on Friday nights. I haven’t felt safe anywhere for many, many months, and triple-check the alarms, the locks, the windows and the dogs before cowering into bed.

The first responsibility of any government is the safety of its people. No one is safe in this land any more. And now they have made it much more dangerous by eliminating the closest thing we’ve ever had to Batman.

Each day each one of us — 46-million, give or take — goes about our affairs not knowing if we will be alive tomorrow. That is wrong. Every move you make is in some killer’s cross-hairs. That is indefensible. Mothers cannot carry babies on their backs and little girls can’t even wait in cars in safety any more. That degree of danger exists only in war zones. The scales have tipped completely. We no longer die by accident; we survive each day by purest chance.

I, who have always trusted too readily, too expansively, too naturally, find it harder and harder to trust anyone any more. I am become genuinely ambivalent about my homeland. I still have some “Proudly South African” stickers, except the slogan is now bracketed by the words “not” and “any more”.

For all I know, this could be my last blog. That is not alarmist. That is the reality of living in the Cradle of Mankind.