Try to navigate virtually any major highway in South Africa at the moment, I dare you. Don't worry about your mode of transport. Try it in a an SUV, mini-bus taxi, take a donkey cart, skateboard or a bicycle and head off down the tar into what has become an abyss of roadworks across the country. A Noddy badge awaits you if you manage to complete this journey or chaos with your mind and mode of transport still intact and in working order. Having almost taken out the 18Th construction worker leaning on his spade (that's LEANING not DIGGING or doing ANYTHING that could constitute work) on what has become a perfidious, sometimes terrifying journey down the ever-perplexing N1 in Cape Town I'm reminded once again of the bullshit we are fed on a daily basis from politicians and their comrades in the private sector. Traffic cones jump out of nowhere, startling already braindead Cape Town drivers into ill-managed advanced driving tactics. Construction bakkies recently upgraded to some degree of importance with the simple, strategic placement of a flash blue light on their rooves trundle down the freeway in their own little, blocked off lane, as if teasing us pleb motorists abut their exclusive road lane. The din of earth movers and jackhammers cut the orchestra of traffic jam cacophony, scaring us out of road rage, which would normally be directed at VW Beetle owners and taxi drivers, and planting our anger into tantalising thoughts of maleficence. Our roads are no longer ours. They have been privatised, sold off to multi-nationals, who cream themselves at the sight of a pothole and any chance at "implementing" yet another multi-katrillion rand project aimed at "bettering the lives of our motorists and creating jobs" or some corporate bullshit rhetoric lazily designed in an attempt to justify lying or at best concealing the truth.
It's transport discrimination, I tell you, slavery of our travelling abilities and enslavement of our patience! I demand Desmond Tutu to be on my team as I wage my (imaginary) war on these pricks and their bulldozing kak. I want an audience with the Dalai Lama where I can seek some spiritual peace and find it in my chi not to engage on mob justice targetting construction workers. One construction company suit told a radio talk show host recently construction on what appears to be a separate highway to the moon on the N1 will be completed by the end of May, "In
time for the World Cup" he quickly added. Stifling my laughter and holding back the puke, I wondered if the suit in question was talking about the same project (maybe he'd mixed it up with a separate project on Planet Blah). Having digested this piffle, I cast my mind back to the mental images I'd committed to my ailing brain of a highway, pocked with workers all picking their noses and practicing their art of staring into the sky. No evidence of urgency was to found there or on the faces of foreman, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee in the company of their mates (no doubt suits in disguise "checking up" on the "progress"I recalled the huge gaps, no wait, canyons in one rather ambitious addition to the road. We are talking about entire sections of a highway which had not even been built. Oh sure the foundations are there, wires and cables ac sending from concrete pillars into nowhere, just ascending, not holding up, reinforcing or really adding to the general finality of it all. For all intents and purposes, the road was just a concept, a wannabe transport infrastructure leading to nothing but further delays, road closures and pathetic explanations as to why deadlines weren't met. It's been 7-years of this constant, desperate race to meet what appear to be ever-shifting deadlines and esoteric, possibly impossible promises. Sure, it may be great and beautiful when completed. But when will this really be? And if you even think of answering, "By the end of the month" or "In time for the World cup", I'll find you, I'll hunt you down and subject you to 7-years of poetry reading from second year English students.
