Embracing One Another As Fellow Human Beings

Our past has shaped us to be who we are and what we know has caused us to react the way we do every day. Our differences have made us the product of mediocre. And instead of embracing one another, we have rather chosen to classify each other accord­ing to race, colour and status.

Every day we are faced with challenges including crime, racism, tribalism, nepotism, sexism, extreme income inequalities, xeno­phobia, manipulations and hatred against one another. These simply perpetuate ani­mosity against one another despite the fact that we all have the same colour blood.

The truth of the matter is that South Africa is known as a rainbow nation and a place that has been an example of reconciliation to the global village.

However, we are still facing a titanic challenge of embracing one other beyond our cultural backgrounds, language, geographical location etc. The desire to be better than others has perpetu­ated greed, hatred and corruption in all lev­els of our society.

These challenges will always be with us until we are ready to confront them. It is often easier to mask unity when looking for an op­portunity to feed our greed from someone’s lack of education, access to resources, skills and power. If those who are in economic and political power had the best interest of humanity at heart, South Africa would not be having so many pay increase and ser­vice delivery protests, with some ending in the loss of lives.

The key question is how long are we going to tip toe around the fact that we are not embracing each other as human beings? Saddening stories that we witness daily are a clear indication that there is a huge prob­lem. The challenge is that, we have mas­tered being deaf to the crying voices, mas­tered blindness against human injustices and have become heartless to the people that are in dire need of our help. It has become easier to see a young girl or an old granny being raped by a number of so called men and yet decide to be silent about it.

We have masked ourselves with fake smiles and meaningless handshakes and speak about equality yet degrade one another.

This status quo and many unspeakable injus­tices will never be changed until such time that we are ready to acknowledge and confront these challenges. It will firstly need us to have changed attitudes, perceptions and assumptions about one another.

If we don’t change this, we will never have a situ­ation where a Mosotho treats uMzulu as a human being or different races respecting each other as fellow human beings. Sec­ondly, we need to have honest and coura­geous conversations regarding these chal­lenges, so that we can have real solutions that aren’t based on cooked statistical data.

Thirdly, the leaders in our nation need to lead as example by embracing each other as human beings and not as enemies. Lastly, this challenge needs the public sector, pri­vate sector, churches, and non-governmen­tal organizations to acknowledge that we need one another. We need to embrace each other as human beings. Motho Ke Motho Ka Batho.