South Africa fails the poor, who struggle on regardless
July 20, 2009
 By Quentin Wray
Richard, a young father who lives in Diepsloot, does odd jobs for me at my house. He paints, tiles, hangs curtains, builds walls - in fact if it needs doing round the house he can pretty much do it. He is punctual, honest and unfailingly cheerful.
I called him in last week to do a bit of painting. He arrived 20 minutes early, as usual, and while we were chatting before I went off to work he mentioned, in an almost offhand way, that he had "had a problem" the week before.
Assuming he had been caught up in the service delivery protests or had his roof blown off or something, I asked him what had happened.
"I had to bury my son," he told me. His son was only four months old and had died after getting "a headache". The hospitals had told him nothing.
I asked him if he was okay. He just smiled at me, although his sadness was palpable, and said he was fine. He has three other children and he needs to work or they won't eat. He doesn't have the luxury of taking time out to deal with his pain, or of going to therapy or of doing any of the things those of us lucky enough to have found work in the formal sector would take for granted.
Being hopelessly ill-equipped for this kind of thing and not knowing what else to do or say, I said I was terribly sorry and left for work, leaving him in his paint-spattered overalls doing what he needed to do to meet his family responsibilities. I haven't been able to get him out of my mind since then.
What is so terribly sad is that Richard is not an isolated case. There are millions just like him making the most of what they've got, quietly taking the smacks that life hands out and doing whatever they can to make ends meet.
They make the lives of the middle class so much easier yet the Richards of this world remain in our peripheral vision: we see them sitting patiently in taxis or walking down suburban streets but we never actually look at them. They remain out of sight until they rise up in protest, when they get fired on by the police, or it is election time and the politicians go round to secure their votes.
People like Richard have been let down by all of us: the ruling party has focused more on its cadre enrichment programmes than on housing, education and health care, opposition parties have proven to be incapable of coming up with any credible alternatives, trade unions have made it hazardous for businesses to give people a break and business has not invested enough in labour-intensive industries.
And, yes, we in the media have failed them too. Their stories most often remain untold and their courage and stoicism remains unrecognised except in the most superficial way.
I have been writing about economics for the past 12 years. In South Africa that means that I have written about poverty, unemployment and human misery for more than a decade. But like most of my colleagues I played it safe and, rather than getting mucky, I have stuck with telling the easy stories about the aggregates rather than the tough ones about the individuals.
To paraphrase Joseph Stalin: The poverty of one man is a tragedy. The poverty of millions is a statistic.
It is time that all of us who have some power or influence - be we in government, business, organised labour or the media - changed this.
Richard, and the millions just like him, deserve no less.
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