Corruption has a smell.
It is the potent stench of urine and human waste that oozes
off the pavement on a cool night in central Johannesburg. Parked next to the
bus stop, the unassuming white van carries not just bread and warm soup, but
hope and temporary relief from the lifeless glare of the city’s countless
concrete giants. Paballo Ya Batho, it
reads on the side panels, which loosely translated from Tswana means ‘Preserving the People’. Sheepishly I begin to hand out bread to these men, making my
way slowly down the line and preluding each 5-sly handover with a trite unjani?-‘ how are you?’
They mostly stick to the scripted norm, nodding in
acknowledgement before muttering that they are okay in some colloquial
variation or another. Isn’t it amazing how, even in extraordinary circumstances
like homelessness, we adhere so thoughtlessly to business-as-usual patterns?
As I continue down the line I find it harder and harder to
look up and face the human being I am handing out charity to. It seems my soul
wants to duck under the weight of their burdens, the plight of abject poverty
in the city of gold which confronts me head-on. I go back to the van for
another loaf. Now I can only bring myself to look at their hands, which tell a
story- their story. These aren’t a plumber’s hands- calloused by splinters and
mishits with the hammer. These are a struggler’s hands, darkened by the kind of
dirt that makes clean spots conspicuous, or perhaps darkened by an untold act
of desperation in an unlit alley- the only witness to a bout of misdirected
rage.
In the moment, I don’t think these thoughts, I feel them.
They course through my brain, down my spine, and across to my shoulders which
probably arch under the tension. I can only write these words in hindsight
because in medias res, I’m processing
everything as and when it happens; poverty does not wait for reflective blog
posts.
With my cognitive faculties so congested, my legs carry me
on autopilot back up the sidewalk once I’ve reached the end of the line and run
out of bread. My eyes begin scanning the pavement for someone I can talk to,
you know, “minister to” as we say in Christianese. I really want to know their
stories but, at the same time, the idea of forcing an inauthentic conversation/
in the name of altruistic religion nauseates me. While weighing this dilemma, I
catch a glimpse of one middle-aged guy in particular, who unlike the many small
groups that have formed seems uninterested in communal dialogue.
I’m drawn to him.
I ask him how he is, and of course he says he’s okay. “My
name is Zama,” I say in isiZulu after sussing out from his name and accent that
it’s safe to switch over to the vernacular. After finding out that he’s from
Zimbabwe, I work out within milliseconds that going down Small Talk Avenue
isn’t desirable for either one of us, so I decide to go straight to the heart
of darkness: “how did you wind up on the streets?”
**********
What followed was fascinating but stays between myself and
him. The real story here is that he, and all those people- mostly men, but also
the many women and children on whose behalf they stood in the line- the real
story is that they are there to begin with.
From the moment that smell hit my nose as I sat listening to
this man’s story, I wondered, as an aspiring policymaker, about the extent to
which underhanded monetary exchanges at the very highest levels of government
were to blame for joblessness. I wondered about that clichéd term ‘corrupt
officials’- how it makes the headlines so often it seems a given at times, a
necessary irritation if you will. Common sense says it is not, but it is
senseless how common these headlines are.
In my academic pursuits I’ve come across the term “illicit
financial flows” and have been shocked at the numbers, the sheer volume of
resources lost to my continent because someone wants it all to him/herself. Yet
on that particular night in the middle of Johannesburg, it was not a numbers
game. Corruption was looking me in the face, dressed in tattered robes. There
she was in front of me, giving birth to a dim-faced young man who squatted
beside me and told me his story of uncertainty and perseverance in a foreign
land.
Nonetheless, another birth was happening in the back of a
white van parked unassumingly besides a bus stop. The sound of it was alive in
the friendly chatter between strangers rich and poor. I saw it on his face when
the wall disintegrated and he smiled at me for the first time in our
conversation. All is not lost for our continent and its leaders.
On Wednesday nights at the centre of Johannesburg, hope for
a corruption-free Africa smells much like warm vegetable soup.
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