A City With Holes in Its Promises
In Johannesburg this week, the ground itself is making an argument. Sinkholes open under streets and yards, the visible scars of illegal gold mining beneath a city that once built its fortune on the same ore, mined legally, by men on a payroll.
South Africans are voting in local elections, many of them furious about services that do not arrive — water that does not run, electricity that flickers, roads that crumble. The ANC, which has governed since apartheid ended, faces that anger directly at the ballot box. This is democracy doing exactly what it should: making a government answer for what it failed to deliver.
But look at who gets blamed for the sinkholes. Not only the companies that abandoned shafts decades ago. Not only the officials who issue no permits and build no formal path into the mineral economy. The men digging underground by candlelight, called "illegal miners," become the scapegoat — as if desperation were a character flaw rather than a response to circumstance.
The Convenient Word "Lazy"
"Those who can work should work" is a sound moral instinct. Idleness is not a virtue, and dignity grows through contribution, not through permanent dependence on others. A healthy society should expect effort from those able to give it.
But the instinct becomes dangerous the moment it is used backwards — not as encouragement, but as an excuse to stop asking questions. Call a man "lazy" and you no longer have to explain why the formal mine closed, why no license exists for small-scale miners, why the municipality cannot keep the lights on in the first place. The word does the government's work for it.
How, then, can we know that someone who does not work is not simply lazy? The honest answer is: we cannot know, from the outside, by looking only at the absence of work. We have to look at what was on offer.
Ability Is Not Only a Personal Fact
"Able to work" sounds like a medical fact — healthy limbs, healthy mind. But ability also depends on the world around a person: Is there a job within reach? A legal path to it? A government that built the road, licensed the trade, kept the lights on so a business could open? A school that taught the skill the job requires?
A man digging illegally under Johannesburg may be extraordinarily willing to work — willing enough to risk his life in an unstable tunnel. What he lacks is not the will. He lacks the legal, licensed, safer version of the very same labor, because no one built it for him.
This is not an argument against the golden rule of work. It is an argument for applying it honestly. Before judging a man idle, ask whether society first built him a ladder — then watch whether he climbs it. If he refuses a ladder that genuinely exists, the judgment of laziness is fair and should be made without embarrassment. If the ladder was never built, the judgment is theater, performed to spare the ones who should have built it.
What the Golden Rule Asks Before the Verdict
Reciprocity asks a simple question: what would you want done to you? If your town's mine closed, your municipality stopped collecting its own revenue honestly, and no legal mining license existed for ordinary people — would you wait patiently for better days, or would you, too, go underground?
South Africa's voters are right to demand better service delivery; that pressure, applied through ballots rather than shrugs, is democracy working as intended. But the same citizens, and the rest of us watching from afar, should resist the easy word that lets failure hide. "Lazy" is sometimes true. It is never automatic.
The wise standard is this: expect work from those who are able, and build the honest paths that make real ability possible — then, and only then, let the verdict of laziness carry any weight at all.