The Cartoons We Draw and the Water We Waste: A Crisis of Priorities
As South Africans debate the ethics of political cartoons and social media accountability, the nation's water infrastructure crumbles beneath our feet—a stark reminder that governance failures demand more than symbolic outrage.
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The letters pages of our newspapers reveal something profound about the state of public discourse in Southern Africa. While citizens debate whether depicting President Cyril Ramaphosa as an animal constitutes blasphemy, Gauteng's taps run dry. While Mark Zuckerberg defends his empire in distant courtrooms, our own infrastructure collapses under the weight of decades of neglect. These parallel conversations—one abstract and theological, the other immediate and material—expose a troubling disconnect between the debates we choose to have and the crises we must confront.
A letter writer to Sowetan Live argued this week that political cartoons depicting leaders as animals represent not merely disrespect, but a fundamental violation of divine order. "God ordered humans to exercise dominion over animals," the correspondent wrote, "if you depict a person as an animal, you're demeaning them and blaspheming their creator." The argument invokes religious authority to police political satire, transforming a question of artistic license into one of spiritual transgression. Yet this framing obscures a more urgent question: what constitutes the greater disrespect—a cartoonist's pen, or a government's failure to deliver the most basic services to its citizens?
The timing of this debate carries particular irony. As readers penned their objections to satirical imagery, another opinion piece in the same publication warned that "Gauteng water woes" represent "a wake-up call we cannot ignore." The province that houses the nation's economic engine faces systematic water shortages not because of drought or natural disaster, but because of infrastructure decay, poor planning, and administrative incompetence. According to the piece published on Sowetan Live, the crisis demands that "we all have to preserve the precious resource"—a call to collective action that implicitly acknowledges the state's inability to manage what should be a fundamental government responsibility.
This is not merely a failure of pipes and pumps. It represents a collapse of the social contract, the implicit agreement that citizens surrender certain freedoms and resources to the state in exchange for essential services. When that contract breaks down—when taps run dry while officials debate their public image—the legitimacy of governance itself comes into question. The cartoons that so offend some readers exist precisely because this contract has been violated. Satire flourishes where accountability fails.
Meanwhile, another correspondent raised concerns about digital accountability, noting that "Mark Zuckerberg is in court defending his Meta products, including Facebook and Instagram, from the accusation that they are deliberately addictive." The observation points to a different kind of infrastructure crisis—one of attention and agency in the digital age. Zuckerberg's courtroom defense takes place in jurisdictions with the regulatory capacity to hold technology giants accountable, to demand answers about algorithmic manipulation and user exploitation. The contrast with our own regulatory environment is instructive. We struggle to hold our own leaders accountable for failing water systems; how can we hope to regulate global technology platforms that shape our information ecosystem?
The letter writer mused that "YouTube might know more about me" than they know about themselves—a recognition of the asymmetric power relationship between users and platforms. This anxiety about surveillance and manipulation deserves serious attention. Yet it also reflects a broader pattern in public discourse: we often find it easier to engage with distant, abstract threats than with the immediate failures of governance that shape our daily lives. A foreign billionaire's data practices provoke more sustained commentary than the systematic collapse of municipal water infrastructure.
These three opinion pieces, published within hours of each other, map the contours of our contemporary predicament. We debate the symbolism of political cartoons while the substance of governance deteriorates. We worry about algorithmic addiction while our physical infrastructure crumbles. We invoke divine authority to protect political leaders from satirical critique while those same leaders preside over the decay of essential services.
The question is not whether these concerns are legitimate—they are. Religious sensibilities matter. Digital rights matter. But the hierarchy of our attention reveals something about our capacity for collective action. When symbolic offenses generate more heat than material failures, when distant courtroom dramas command more focus than local infrastructure collapse, we signal that we have lost sight of what governance actually means.
Water does not flow because we police political cartoons. Accountability does not emerge from theological arguments about animal imagery. The preservation of precious resources—whether water, attention, or democratic legitimacy—requires sustained focus on the unglamorous work of governance: maintenance, planning, regulation, and the willingness to hold power accountable through every available means, including satire.
The cartoons will continue, because they must. They are not the problem. They are the symptom of a deeper disease: a political class that has failed to deliver on its most basic promises, and a public discourse that sometimes struggles to distinguish between the performance of governance and its substance. As Gauteng's taps run dry, we might ask ourselves which deserves more of our outrage—the image of a leader, or the reality of their failures. The answer should be obvious. That it is not suggests we have larger problems than any cartoon could capture.