Radio 702

Subject: Radio 702.

I have been very impressed with the response and the maturity of the questioners ringing in to Radio 702 regarding the drought that is facing Cape Town.
Zero date is April 10th when the water is due to be shut off to homes and people will have to queue to collect water at various points across the city. I suppose those living in the more rudimentary parts of the Cape Flats would say "so what it's what I do every day since we were old enough to walk". But the rudimentary nature of life's chores is alien to most of us grown used to hot and cold running water.
The what if scenario, what if the rains do not come, was dealt with very expertly by a woman Zinthia who heads the Cape Town Councils division regarding water affairs. She was on top of her game and seemed to know and cope with any issues raised about the crisis and future planning. Perhaps she should have been in charge of the budgetary resource which could have prevented this happening in the first place but with so many urgent needs and only one pot of money the chances are that the expensive solution to finding more ways of storing water gets kicked into the long grass Year on Year.
So often one gets the impression that the country is falling apart because of corrupt governance at the national level and no doubt it's true but Cape Town still seems to keep its democratic head with a relatively non racially absorbed group of Councillors. 
Zinthia seemed one of those, caught in a predicament she gave one confidence that help was at hand and a system worked out to survive.

Radio 702 was the station we listened to if we wanted to get away from the government propaganda of the SABC. John Robbie the ex-Irish rugby player who had decided to settle in South Africa was one of the dynamic, tell it as it is, radio show hosts (recently retired) who, from the early days of the station (1986) had been a sort of civilising thread running through the tumultuous world of Apartheid South Africa. 

Even today living in England  I love to listen to the traffic reports on 702 describing the traffic hold ups at places such as Gillooly's or Bedford View. The problems then are much the same as today for motorists traveling along those roads and through suburbs. It brings so many memories back of the many happy years that I spent there and it's still  happening without any input from me. A life and a vibrancy so different to the rather staid life in England but of course distance and sentiment clouds the vision and the voices on 702 do not echo the chaos of surviving for many of the people living today within the violence of modern day Johannesburg. The map sets in aspic the routes and the suburbs we used to call home but does not shine a light on the shadowy world of the unemployed who filter in at night to pick up what they can. The knife edge existence for the many does not emerge from the map or the calm voices on the radio, even the statistics are grossly inaccurate since surveys are meaningless in Alexander Township where the structure required for a census or an opinion poll is not part of the largely itinerant mass of people.  
"Permanence" is a joke, a sad joke. Life is a question mark from day to day, survival of the fittest means that you are in perpetual fear once the sun sets, locked behind your shack door praying that the gangs have not found reason to search you out. 
Hell on earth indeed.