Poetic Licence: We have turned suffering into a competition - IOL

Rabbie Serumula, author, award-winning poet, journalist.

In Durban, flood victims want to know why four years of waiting is still not enough to earn them a permanent home. Foreign nationals want to know where they can sleep without fear. The anti-immigration activists want answers. And government, as usual, wants to move people somewhere.

We have become a country that mistakes movement for progress.

Four years after the devastating KwaZulu-Natal floods of 2022, there are still people living with the consequences of promises that have not been fulfilled. Families who lost their homes were moved into temporary accommodation and told, in one way or another, that something more permanent was coming.

Then came another humanitarian crisis.

The foreign nationals had been sheltering outside Durban's Che Guevara Road Home Affairs office after being displaced from their homes ahead of earlier anti-illegal immigration protests. Many had sought voluntary deportation, while others remained stranded with no clear path forward. Their presence became a political issue. Protests followed. Pressure mounted. Eventually, they agreed to move to Lindela.

And now, two groups of displaced people have been placed on opposite sides of the same argument.

The tragedy is not that flood victims are asking why they are still waiting. They have every right to ask. Four years is a long time to live with temporary solutions.

The tragedy is that they have been waiting long enough for another desperate group to become their competition.

Both are suffering. Both are vulnerable. And both have found themselves caught in a country that seems increasingly incapable of dealing with suffering without turning it into a political contest.

Maybe this is the part we don't like admitting.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from having to prove that your pain matters.

You start keeping dates. You remember promises. You count the years. You watch someone else receive what you have been asking for and wonder whether your turn has simply been forgotten.

That is a dangerous place for any society to leave its people.

Because eventually, frustration needs somewhere to go. And if there is no answer from those who are supposed to provide one, it finds the nearest target.

A neighbour. A migrant. Another poor family. Someone else standing in the same line.

I don't think that makes people monsters. I think it makes them tired.

But tired people still deserve better than being handed another person to blame.

We should be able to look at what is happening in Durban and feel the discomfort of it without choosing a side in somebody else's misery.

Perhaps a decent society is not one that decides who deserves help first.

Perhaps it is one where people don't have to fight so hard to get it.