Let's honour the dreams of the poor

Few can capture the essence of a sociopolitical crisis as pithily as the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. In his 1899 poem, He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, Yeats deftly sets out the material and psychological distance between the poor and the rich who rule over them.

- Tinyiko Maluleke and Roelf Meyer

South Africa is a country where the gap between the rich and the poor has been growing, and the poor have nothing left to give but their fondest dreams - dreams that are being wantonly trampled upon.

Resonant with another of Yeats's famous poems, The Second Coming, we have witnessed how, in one short generation (from 1994 to 2024), "things" have begun to "fall apart" all around us, as the political "centre" no longer seems to be holding.

Thirty-one years later, Nelson Mandela's 1994 promise of a "triumph in the effort to implant hope in the breasts of the millions of our people" has begun to sound like a farce.

For a nation whose economy has been comatose for more than a decade, former president Thabo Mbeki's emphatic ending of his "I am an African" speech with the words "nothing can stop us now" rings hollow 29 years later.

Yet it is instructive that Mbeki uttered these words at the celebration of one of the greatest outcomes of the first National Dialogue - the South African Constitution.

Today, the words once spoken by former president Kgalema Motlanthe in his 2008 inaugural speech - that "we remain on course to halve unemployment and poverty by 2014" - sound like a cruel joke.