In grocery stores bread and milk shelves are empty. Shops close doors and safety gates as looters gather.
On pavements rubbish bins stand unemptied or strewn all over. In the streets school learners mill about, unable to travel to school. In their houses workers hide away, afraid to risk attacks when trying to get to work.
On the roads social development workers rush from poor communities, injured and with damaged vehicles. Images of burning tyres, violence, destruction and death on news channels leave viewers and readers in despair.
On social media municipal officials and a national minister angrily debate the requirements of law and publicly accuse and insult the other. Inevitably various political parties declare their intention to engage with taxi operators, promising solutions.
In mosques and churches, the faithful pray for leaders to find solutions and see peace return. Community organisations ramp up projects to distribute urgent essentials as best they are able. And commentators and academics again revisit the historical causes of an industry closely associated with the worst parts of South Africa’s history.
In such a context the assault of the taxi industry is not on the city authorities, but on the hearts and minds of citizens and communities – a strategy that obviously aims to build pressure through an upset electorate.
As an expression of underlying social structures, this war illustrates the struggle of power and for power. Its tools are violence and chaos. A war wherein actors must dislocate the other from positions of power they hold or are building in the social, political and economic hierarchies of society.
But such a war requires fertile grounds to take hold and give power to its aggressors. This is where the strike really hits hardest: it represents an open threat to the courage of people to rise up and continue their struggle for a future – hopelessness represents the fertile ground of dependency and powerlessness that aggressors hold.
A grim reality most visible in the tired and fearful faces of lines of commuters walking to work. Hope has arguably become a commodity with which parties to the taxi wars trade to legitimise their campaign.
Taxi operators declare their power to interrupt society on all levels, thereby showing that they hold the means to provide hope. City authorities declare their campaign as a war for freedom from taxi oppression and therefore to give hope to local communities. In such a context hope itself is has become a tired notion.
Critics of the notion of hope as a political project argue that hope is naïve, cultivating a confidence not rounded in reality. They argue that hope in a reality of struggle rather highlights how insurmountable societal challenges are, leaving citizens demotivated and therefore disempowered, dependent on the powerful.
Some go so far as to define hope as a project in politics as a malevolent force in public life. Hope is however a constructed reality rather than a wishful project of citizen and community discourses. It is more than an objective that society works to achieve. It is an observation of many signs of resolve among and between citizens and across communities.
This means that hidden beneath the surface of violence and power struggles, there are images and stories of gritty determination.
Instances of citizens stepping though the smoke to get to work, to clean the street, to open the school and share the little bread left with neighbours. Therein lie the real victors of this war, in the resolute faces of lines of commuters walking to work. On the surface the lie of hopelessness, while hidden beneath the truth of hope.
* Rudi Buys, NetEd Group Chief Academic Officer and Executive Dean, DaVinci Business Institute.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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