The metaphor of the lamb and the lion: understanding economic injustice

THE story of the lamb and the lion bears testimony in today's experience of water runs upstream.

- Dr Pali Lehohla

The poor contribute continuously to the wealth of the rich, and are surprised by the unexplained riches of the rich against the wretchedness of the poverty in which they languish.

Water continues to run upstream instead of downstream.

Nothing ever trickles, let alone down under the trickledown economy of neo-liberals.

It only floods upwards away from the poor.

When the story of the lamb and the lion was told under kerosene lamp to enthused youth with soot packed nostrils and mealie pap filled gums decades before Milton Friedman market fundamentalism of the Chicago School indeed were prophesy accomplished in their life time.

Decades later visited by crimson red gums with a dispersion of isolated lone brown teeth their fortunes of a river flowing up stream was real.

For all they saw and witnessed was after years of dirt wages on the mines all they can see are pin striped suits donned by their counterparts who affirm that indeed water flows naturally upstream.

As they should contend with their fate decades later, they have no other answer than the fact that the lion was correct all along after all - water flows naturally upstream.

The tale is about a lamb that had lost its mother to a marauding lion.

Little lamb was downstream drinking water when it got confronted by the raw upstream.

You are dirtying the water just like your mother, the ewe.

I am thirsty and I need to drink roars the lion.