By: Nosipho Ntombela

We should sit down and ask ourselves, what happened to us?  Did we really have that hunger for freedom and that need be a united nation? Or was it just a front to get past apartheid? Granted, many of us younger people were not there, but the truth is that the South Africa we are living in now is new to everyone.

Today a person can comfortably live off another‘s sweat and pain with no shame. Nowadays people fail to even greet.

Respect for the elderly is diminishing. We should be ashamed to even call ourselves South Africans if being a South African means to be cruel and non-sympathetic. This is not what freedom means, this is not what Tata Nelson Mandela and other South African heroes fought and died for. We have failed to honor the blood they shed.

We are living in the apartheid era again and we do not even see it. Mental oppression consumes us.  We are abusing each other.

We are at war with each other but we are too consumed with the need for peace to even see it. We claim to want change but our minds are too dunked in greed to even see that we are killing each other. What happened to Ubuntu?

According to Ayamukela Mtshali not everyone has lost Ubuntu.

“There are people here in South Africa who are still kind and helpful. It is just that they are a few,” said Mtshali.

Ziyanda Mathonsi, a 22-year-old Durban citizen said, “Ubuntu will never came back- you should be happy if you meet someone you do not know and they are nice to you. If greeting is a problem, then I am sure actually going out of one’s way to help is very, very rare.”

Is it Ubuntu to see someone starve to death while we throw away food every day? Or is Ubuntu to boo our president in front of our visitors? Is it still Ubuntu to let your sister or brother be mugged in front of you while you pretend not to see? Maybe it is Ubuntu to kill your mother because of money. Yet we shout we want a better South Africa. Maybe South Africa wants better citizens

Citizens who will love each other like heart and blood. Citizens who will rejoice at each other’s success and bare no hate.

Citizens who will flow together like water. Wouldn’t this be a great nation if I do not look at the pigmentation of your skin color but look at the fact that you are a human being? It is time that we unite and live up to the obligations imparted by our freedom and not lose ourselves in the process.