People are getting increasingly tired of the lack of service delivery in South Africa.
It is a no-brainer. The other day a woman drove her Mercedes through the front windows of a bank, apparently out of sheer frustration.
We are talking about private sector service, which should be at least a notch up in quality from the disastrous service delivered in the public sector.
It is was, however, quite chilling how her action was lauded, even praised, making you wonder if we are on the precipice of some kind of surreal Stephen King society.
TV series such as The Handmaid’s Tale are a horrifying reality check that a society can easily morph into something barbaric and undemocratic if laws are thrown out of the window along with all moral sense of right and wrong.
After all, no lack of service delivery should condone actions such as driving your vehicle into a bank. It is lawless, reckless and dangerous and it is not humorous in any way.
We are all tired of bad service delivery, but it seems South Africa is suffering from moral self-destruction, and soon we could end up in a society such as the terrifying Lord of the Flies scenario, where the fittest survive no matter the cost or consequences.
Many times we think South Africa is strict when it comes to laws to ensure society is kept in check, but compared to many other countries we are still very lax in enforcing such laws.
There is a fine line between a dictatorship and a democracy, but once we begin to justify lawlessness along with any kind of anarchy, then we have slipped deeper into the void of chaos.
After all, if someone steals R30-million from the government or if someone drives into the front windows of a bank, neither action should be condoned, advocated or approved.
Recently, in Canada, alcohol-related impaired driving laws have been updated. The new laws will give police officers the authority to demand Breathalyser tests from any driver they pull over. Previously, officers could only test drivers if they had a reasonable suspicion the person was impaired.
Any driver who refuses to take the test can be charged.
These are very strict laws and have naturally been met with a lot of concern, but Canada is at least trying to instil some sense of law and order. We are mentioning Canada because many South Africans want to emigrate to that cold part of the world.
These stronger laws are similar to ones in several other countries around the world, such as Australia, Denmark, France and Germany. In Ireland, mandatory screening reduced the number of road deaths by about 40 per cent in the first four years it was enforced.
Consider how in Australia, lawmakers have recently voted overwhelmingly in favour of laws that make it illegal not to remove footage of ‘a terrorist act’, murder, torture, rape and kidnapping on social media, and spell out that internet service, content and hosting providers will be held culpable.
Platforms like Facebook and YouTube could thus face fines approaching billions of dollars, or 10 per cent of global annual turnover, for failing to allow the “expeditious removal” of the offending material, while executives could face three years in jail.
Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who is facing a difficult re-election battle, said: “Big social media companies have a responsibility to take every possible action to ensure their technology products are not exploited by murderous terrorists.”
Countries across the world are thus becoming stricter with laws and how to enforce them. This is because there is a deepening sense of foreboding that there is also a thin line between order and disorder.
There are numerous other countries where very strict social media laws apply, but not here in South Africa, where cyber-bullying, cyber porn, cybercrime and cyber hacking is common. In South Africa, social media is used freely to spread comments and opinions, even if it is borderline discriminatory, defamatory or fuels hate or violence.
When it comes to strict laws, consider how in China it is a crime to instil Western thoughts and influences in the minds of the Chinese youth, while the media is controlled and so is access to the internet.
Singapore may be small, but the government’s firm implementation of their rules and policies on locals and tourists alike are notches higher compared to other countries on this list. Any wrong move will cost someone a fine. Spitting in public carries a fine. Smoking in public will get you in serious trouble. Wearing the wrong dress when going out will land you in jail.
And those are just petty violations. One can only imagine how stringent the Singaporean government is when dealing with serious crimes.
Maybe South Africa should become stricter. Who knows, because really, our laws are but a walk in the park. And then we are not talking about dealing with crime in general, but the general sense of promoting a culture of disorder (and this applies especially to the taxis on the road).
We all love our freedoms and supposed human rights, but lawlessness, be it wide-scale corruption or destroying property, remains rampant in so many shapes, forms and ways. Maybe SA needs a wake-up call.
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