Eskom has stopped using diesel. They say they can’t afford it anymore. 

They haven’t simply stopped USING diesel, they don’t even have any back-up supplies of diesel available should they require to use it in an emergency.

This is like admitting to bankruptcy. 

It seems as if everything is happening simultaneously right now in South Africa. 

Are we fast approaching a kind of singularity, a pivotal event when all our problems, all the looming predictions by doomsayers, will catch up with us all at once? 

How ironic that this coming Friday is called Black Friday.

In the future, we may very well remember Black Friday of 2022 for unusual reasons. Reasons that have very little to do with shopping and bargain hunting. 

We might remember this Black Friday as the Friday when the last vestiges of our pretence of normality started crumbling. We may, in fact, remember November and December, the so-called festive season, as the time when the cracks which had been showing for a while burst open into chasms of disaster and mayhem. 

We have known for some time that we are facing ruin on many fronts. Euphemistically speaking, things have not been looking up in our economy for quite a while now. 

But when I received an email from a major arts festival last week informing me that they will not be able to pay me for my two sold-out performances last month, the alarm bells started ringing very loudly in my head.

At the same time, my online art business, a lucrative venture which sustained me all through lockdown, when all music performances were cancelled, seems to be taking quite a bit of a dip. 

The reason isn’t that my art isn’t as good as it used to be. My art has never been all that good anyway. But for almost three years I’d been able to sell it. 

I still receive emails from interested buyers, but when I tell them the prices of my art works – which in three years had never gone up, by the way – I simply never hear from them again. 

People don’t have money.

PEOPLE. DON’T. HAVE. MONEY. 

It’s not just the homeless and the destitute who are suffering right now. Everywhere, ordinary folks are feeling the pinch of these extraordinary times.   

A countrywide strike of civil servants is under way. It is not just a frivolous strike. Their pay packages are unable to sustain them, they really need a raise desperately. 

How many people will arrive at the malls on Black Friday to shop? I have a feeling the figures might be lower than usual. 

Too many things are coming to a head. The government is unable to raise the minimum monthly handout, a pitiful amount which is already grossly inadequate as it is. The fact that so many people are dependent on that handout speaks volumes about the state of our economy. Unemployment is becoming the norm rather than the exception. 

Read in Daily Maverick: “If the Buffalo falls, we’re on our own – there is no leadership left in the country”

What an irony it is, the fact that we are having Black Friday sales in the middle of all this agony.  

What an irony it is, Cyril Ramaphosa being out of the country at a time such as this. Is meeting King Charles really all that important right now? 

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What an irony it is, the fact that the so-called festive season is around the corner. I wonder what this festive season will be like for the majority of South Africans.   

I wonder what this Black Friday will be like for many South Africans.

Perhaps I don’t have to wonder. 

It might be more than just a black Friday. It might be a very dark Friday. It might be the first of quite a number of very dark Fridays. 

I am not one of those people who believe the worst-case scenarios for this country. I know that, in many respects, things are looking up. It’s a great thing that alternative sources of energy are at last being seriously considered. It’s a good thing that, at last, slowly but surely, the culprits of the nine wasted years are charged and brought to book, even if the process still seems to be far too slow. There is at least a slim chance that, when the next general election comes around, the opposition will have got their shit together to unseat the ANC. 

There are solutions in the pipeline everywhere, rays of hope, green shoots of promise. I know, I know, I know. Human potential, true grit, the courage and tenacity of South Africans and all that. 

These green shoots will take time to grow, though, and even tenacity needs some room to manoeuvre. As it is, things are bound to get worse before they get better.

Perhaps much worse. 

What will this coming Black Friday be remembered for? 

It might very well be a bit different from the Black Fridays preceding it. 

Our country is facing a very real fiscal cliff. And it’s starting to show. 

This is our moment of truth. 

This is where the chickens come home to roost. 

This is where we need to stop, and take stock, and wake up to the sobering reality that South Africa is running on empty. DM