South Africa is running on empty. And so, a different kind of Black Friday looms

Eskom has stopped using diesel. They say they can’t afford it anymore. 

They haven’t simply stopped USING diesel, they don’t even have any back-up supplies of diesel available should they require to use it in an emergency.

This is like admitting to bankruptcy. 

It seems as if everything is happening simultaneously right now in South Africa. 

Are we fast approaching a kind of singularity, a pivotal event when all our problems, all the looming predictions by doomsayers, will catch up with us all at once? 

How ironic that this coming Friday is called Black Friday.

In the future, we may very well remember Black Friday of 2022 for unusual reasons. Reasons that have very little to do with shopping and bargain hunting. 

We might remember this Black Friday as the Friday when the last vestiges of our pretence of normality started crumbling. We may, in fact, remember November and December, the so-called festive season, as the time when the cracks which had been showing for a while burst open into chasms of disaster and mayhem. 

We have known for some time that we are facing ruin on many fronts. Euphemistically speaking, things have not been looking up in our economy for quite a while now. 

But when I received an email from a major arts festival last week informing me that they will not be able to pay me for my two sold-out performances last month, the alarm bells started ringing very loudly in my head.

At the same time, my online art business, a lucrative venture which sustained me all through lockdown, when all music performances were cancelled, seems to be taking quite a bit of a dip. 

The reason isn’t that my art isn’t as good as it used to be. My art has never been all that good anyway. But for almost three years I’d been able to sell it. 

I still receive emails from interested buyers, but when I tell them the prices of my art works – which in three years had never gone up, by the way – I simply never hear from them again. 

People don’t have money.

PEOPLE. DON’T. HAVE. MONEY. 

It’s not just the homeless and the destitute who are suffering right now. Everywhere, ordinary folks are feeling the pinch of these extraordinary times.   

A countrywide strike of civil servants is under way. It is not just a frivolous strike. Their pay packages are unable to sustain them, they really need a raise desperately. 

How many people will arrive at the malls on Black Friday to shop? I have a feeling the figures might be lower than usual. 

Too many things are coming to a head. The government is unable to raise the minimum monthly handout, a pitiful amount which is already grossly inadequate as it is. The fact that so many people are dependent on that handout speaks volumes about the state of our economy. Unemployment is becoming the norm rather than the exception. 

Read in Daily Maverick: “If the Buffalo falls, we’re on our own – there is no leadership left in the country”

What an irony it is, the fact that we are having Black Friday sales in the middle of all this agony.  

What an irony it is, Cyril Ramaphosa being out of the country at a time such as this. Is meeting King Charles really all that important right now?