Luxury Objects

D U D U Z I L E   S O K H E L A

I’m a social worker and served my people working in different non-profit organizations in South Africa. I’ve been inspired by my deceased sister and my living mother’s altruistic causes in the community I grew up in. Throughout my career in social work serving humanity, I have witnessed and worked with people living in abject poverty, need, want and social exclusion. I’m author ofa book entitled “Why Urban Rural Under-developed Communities Will Never Develop in South Africa. Mooiplaas Informal Settlement: A Relevant Case Study In the Front Lines.” 

I chose Luxury Objects because …

… For me they represent corruption and it is corruption that, above all, social workers need to fight in my country, South Africa. It costs the South African gross domestic product (GDP) at least R27 billion ($2bn) annually as well as the loss of 76,000 jobs that would otherwise have been created, according to the Ebrahim Patel, the Minister of Economic Development. Corruption is the weapon of mass destruction in my country: and the effects are felt worst by the poorest. One billion rands have been lost in what is called ‘state capture’, but corruption cannot really be quantified, it cannot be touched, and thus invisible, it is particularly insidious.

As an example of corruption, an investigation into VBS Mutual Bank found that at least 53 people and companies may have benefited from the looting of R1.9 billion ($130 million). Looting of state resources has a negative impact on efforts to fulfill the basic needs of the poor who remain the most marginalised segment of the population and the ones with whom social workers most desperately need to work.

Corruption happens over a cup of tea or coffee in opulent, luxurious places. Those involved in corruption normalize it and eventually entrench it, as those who corrupt and those who are corrupted collude in order to make it happen. It is invisibly eats away at the coffers that should be used for the needy and indigent.

When the ANC won the first democratic elections in South Africa with a landslide victory, they had promised the majority of South Africans – those Black South Africans that were swimming in the river of poverty and indignity – that they will improve the quality of their lives standard of living. Instead the officials began leading opulent lifestyles and disregarded the needs of the masses. Corruption, in the form of extensive and intensive looting of state coffers, continues to rip at the fabric of society. It makes the poor poorer and the rich richer – a gap too wide to fathom. How does society reconcile the two?

Social workers should advocate strongly and in a very real sense for an end to corruption, and for inclusiveness in the mainstream economy and for equal opportunities for the poor. Corruption is a weapon of mass destruction in the lives of the poor and indigent in South Africa and social workers must oppose it at every turn.