{"id":1058689,"date":"2022-04-15T15:49:00","date_gmt":"2022-04-15T15:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/04\/15\/carping-point-do-we-really-have-to-keep-wandering-in-the-wilderness-for-the-next-40-years\/"},"modified":"2022-04-15T15:49:00","modified_gmt":"2022-04-15T15:49:00","slug":"carping-point-do-we-really-have-to-keep-wandering-in-the-wilderness-for-the-next-40-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/04\/15\/carping-point-do-we-really-have-to-keep-wandering-in-the-wilderness-for-the-next-40-years\/","title":{"rendered":"Carping Point: Do we really have to keep wandering in the wilderness for the next 40 years?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Johannesburg \u2013 As we prepare to celebrate Easter Sunday tomorrow, many of us might feel we\u2019re actually reliving Passover. For those of you who weren\u2019t sleeping in Sunday School, that\u2019s the story of Moses getting the flock out of Egypt pursued by an angry Pharaoh.<\/p>\n

Pharaoh was the ruler of Egypt, where the Israelites had been enslaved. He wasn\u2019t too keen on letting them go, but 10 biblical phenomena changed his mind. Being a typical politician, he reneged and pursued the Israelites, but then drowned when the Red Sea closed in on him.<\/p>\n

We might not all have been erupting in boils, but we\u2019ve had two years of lockdown and 15 years of load shedding. As for pestilence, locusts are literally laying waste to vast tracts of the Northern Cape, Western Cape and Eastern Cape. Then there\u2019s destruction; the good folk of KZN narrowly missed everything literally going up in flames last July, now they\u2019re in danger of being swept away as the major rivers in the province burst their banks.<\/p>\n

Famine? Maybe not widespread, but a third of the country is dependent on government grants just to subsist. Food prices are going through the roof. There\u2019s no guarantee that we will dodge it. Chuck in xenophobia and the roads are literally running in blood, even if the taps aren\u2019t.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re not just powerless to change it, it doesn\u2019t look like we want to. On Sunday night, the ANC voted back disgraced former Durban mayor Zandile Gumede as KZN regional chair. She wasn\u2019t there because she\u2019s had to step aside as she\u2019s out on bail facing 2 793 charges of corruption, fraud, money laundering and racketeering. Now, thanks to her chums, she\u2019s stepped inside.<\/p>\n

As surely as day follows night, uBaba bailed from his corruption trial on Monday. His doctors said he wasn\u2019t well enough to be in the dock, as his lawyers feverishly filed new papers to higher courts. As @tzwide tweeted: \u201cThe year is 2040, the 98-year-old Mr JG Zuma is appearing before a specially created tribunal to deal with the question of whether or not he can appear in court for the criminal trial he has been itching to attend for close to 40 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

His lawyers, using the legal equivalent of throwing a fistful of darts at a dartboard, slipped in a warning to the presiding judge that there\u2019d be repeat of last July if the trial went ahead, while taking a leaf out of Afriforum\u2019s book by instituting a private prosecution of the tireless Billy Downer \u2013 because he\u2019s too good at his job.<\/p>\n

But before we throw our hands up in despair, we need to remember that for every pharaoh, every pus-filled boil, every locust, human and otherwise, and every frog croaking about our heels, we\u2019ve got our own Moses too. As the first footage of the devastation started streaming from Durban and surrounds, the truck engines were already turning over at the Gift of the Givers\u2019 depot in Johannesburg. Dr Imtiaz Sooliman always shows up to deliver us from the clutches of despair.<\/p>\n

But do we really have to keep wandering in the wilderness for the next 40 years?<\/p>\n

The Saturday Star<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

– Advertisement – Johannesburg \u2013 As we prepare to celebrate Easter Sunday tomorrow, many of us might feel we\u2019re actually reliving Passover. For those of you who weren\u2019t sleeping in Sunday School, that\u2019s the story of Moses getting the flock out of Egypt pursued by an angry Pharaoh. Pharaoh was the ruler of Egypt, where […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1058690,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3894],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1058689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-south-africa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1058689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1058689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1058689\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1058689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1058689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1058689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}