What's the difference between a "failed State" and a state that is failing its citizens?

It gets tiring to appear to be continually harping on about the same concerns, as part of a seeming minority of voices in the desert, but silence should not be an option in a cacophony of so much normalised wrong, as silence would inadvertently cede all the space to normalising the abnormal.

There is a lot of truth in the need to distance oneself from a situation to better appreciate it, be it a relationship of any kind or a country, especially a country like South Africa.

Looking at it from a distance and having the privilege of comparing it to another, far better managed and led, society enables one to appreciate the extent to which so much wrong has been allowed and normalised over time.

The often-repeated analogy of frogs in a bowl filled with water whose temperature is slowly rising fits what has been allowed to happen to South Africa over the past two decades, to this day; some people would say, with reason, that it has been going on for much longer that two decades.

Here's a conservative list.

• Standing back when criminally implicated individuals, many of them lacking basic requisite skills, get appointed – often politically deployed – into important positions in government and state institutions.
• Little public pushback when criminally implicated people get redeployed into other state institutions even before they get their names cleared, following accusations of having done wrong in previous employment by the state.?
• Defending individuals described above – either treating them as victims or heroes/heroines – often in exchange for very short-term material gratification. In many such cases, no amount of information that has made it into the public domain about the deeds of such individuals will sway the views of those who defend them.
• Rising levels of criminality, especially violent crime; home invasions, rapes, rising numbers of assassinations in public places, especially drinking spots.
• Twenty-eight years of a political Ponzi scheme by a party that has overseen literal destruction of the country's key infrastructure: consumer and goods railway lines, train stations, roads, ports, as well as other key infrastructure needed for a smooth functioning and potentially growing economy.
• A worsening power supply network crippling whole sectors of the economy and, even painfully, robbing the needed small business sector of the ability to create jobs and contribute to economic growth and lessening poverty.???
• The seeming inability or, is it refusal, by many to connect the dots between failing institutions and the many individuals they defend as heroes/heroines.
• Continued employment – particularly in state institutions – of services by firms, some of them international, that have been seriously implicated in enabling and benefitting from state capture and other forms of corruption.
• A massively weakened criminal justice system – especially at crime investigation and docket preparation levels – and the frustrating lack of movement in bringing politically connected individuals to justice without fear, favour, or prejudice.?
• The inability of many ordinary citizens to take walks, jog, or cycle in their own neighbourhoods without the visible presence of private security companies that many communities cannot afford, for fear of violent criminal attacks. As a result, it has become normal for many South Africans live in homes that – to a foreigner – look like jail cells with costly, heightened security systems, including, in some homes, extra security gates leading to bedrooms as added buffers against regular home invasions that take place while people sleep at night.
• An ever tanking economy and clear signs of South Africa nearing the front of the queue to receive its own formal "failed state" sticker.????

Seen from far, the above concerns paint a frighteningly sad picture of a country that once held much promise.?It is even sadder to note that with the same people in political office for 28 years, and clearly having run out of new ideas – or interest in entertaining ideas that emanate from outside their inner, often archaic, political fold – the country stands to experience more pain before things get better. No improvement is likely to happen before there is a clear change in political and economic direction.

Doing things the same way over and over again is unlikely to lead to new outcomes for South Africa, but many seem unable to see this because they're deeply caught up in the daily grind of dodging criminal attacks, waving in and out of regular power cuts, and finding new ways to either protect existing income – for those lucky enough to still have it – or, for increasing numbers of South Africans whose income no longer covers their basic monthly needs from one salary to the next, to generate new income streams.

The "lucky" ones – and their numbers have also grown – rely on measly government grants while those who cannot access them are forced to either knock endlessly on the doors of family and loved ones for help or to do crime to secure their next meals. In an ironic way, what used to be termed "black tax" is about the only thing that has grown more "colourblind" as the exposure to economic pain widens.

South Africa still has all it needs to look into the mirror and begin engaging in the same uniting, multiparty discussions that it had just ahead of the end of apartheid. This would consist of identifying the common obstacle to realising the promises embedded in its Constitution – just like they did with apartheid at the time.

It would also ensure that pity differences that only serve to secure and advance the narrow interests of contemporary political entrepreneurs and other opportunists are set aside to confront and remove that obstacle that continues to sit comfortably between South Africa and its real potential, its dream deferred.

None of this will happen while South Africans allow themselves to be pitted against one another on superficial grounds and national unity remains a chimera.

All the above-listed concerns are abnormal in a modern society of rights and responsibilities and should be handled as such. If national unity remains slippery and nothing brings South Africans together to confront the obvious causes of the state the country finds itself in, today, the climb back will be even harder and longer when their eyes finally open and competing evenly with other nations in the global arena will seem impossible, relegating the country to the list of those forever relying on foreign aid and crippling, unaffordable loans in hard currencies.?