A view in city living

The apartment

The chute is at the end of the corridor to the right, through four doors, some serving as fire doors and others I am yet to properly determine apart from the fact that one of them is useful.

The communal living in an apartment block offers an interesting social experiment in engaging with people you don’t know but leave the evidence of both their existence and irritation.

The building we access with electronic codes and are not supposed to let anyone tailgate us into the building if they are unknown to us. Yet, we all somehow work on the premise that anyone who follows so closely behind us probably has business in the building that is unlikely to be nefarious.

The people

I am of a reticent disposition, I rarely tailgate access to a building where I am a guest, I will wait for the host to acknowledge me and give me access to the building. At certain times, my bell rings and the person at the door is unknown, to the unknown, I will not provide access, no matter the tales they have to tell.

Our post-boxes stacked on each other within a hall to the back entrance is on two sides on the walls and there is nothing as irksome as receiving junk mail, but worse still is those who drop their unneeded mail on the floor. I will be asking the concierge to keep an eye on the closed circuit television camera to catch out the culprit.

I could not help but notice that someone had taken a brutal implement to the post box for flat 27 and the door to the post box is left open, warped and damaged. It is likely that the occupant of that apartment is tenant rather than an owner because no owner would nominally exhibit such vandalism.

The chute

The room where the electricity meters are for each floor sees much activity; parcels and packages delivered to the concierge who serves many purposes including this; storing the goods in this room which is more a cubicle.

The activity in that space presages inactivity in my department, thrice goods have been stored there and in the process, the main switch to my apartment tripped off. There was a time I was away in South Africa and after the first week out of four I could no more contact my computer, well, the power had gone and with that, all was stored in my freezer went to waste with an unbearable stink.

That was a number of visits to the chute that allows every floor to send their household rubbish and waste apart from recycled stuff to the huge waste bins in the basement. You chuck your rubbish in the chute and it should slide down and land with a thud that you should hear.

Sometimes, it requires the swinging of the chute door to allow the bag fall through, yet some on my floor do not wait to see that their rubbish has left the receptacle and fallen into the bin. Usually, these are bigger than normal bags and it takes a bit of working at to let the bag fall through before you could put yours in.

The Concierge

The absence of housetraining that includes the consideration of others is evident in these bugbears, litter, rubbish, spills, smells, blockages, noise and those are just a few of the problems with sharing an apartment block. Were it not for the presence of the concierge to attend to some of these issues, existence here would have bordered on the unbearable.

This is life in the city centre, the conveniences, however, almost always outweigh the inconveniences.

South Africa: Rubbish!

Rubbish everywhere

As an outside observer in South Africa where every day seems to present scandal, impunity, ineptitude and corruption as headlines, nothing better exemplifies a fundamental dysfunction in this society than the sight of refuse strewn over the streets in Johannesburg City centre.

For weeks, there has been a workers’ dispute with their employers, the waste management company, Pikitup and basically, no waste or rubbish has been picked up for quite a while.

The problem is not so much that the rubbish has piled up on the pavements and at lampposts, but that to exacerbate a seriously deteriorating situation, some agents of anarchy have taken to a kind of muck-racking that involves spreading the heaps of rubbish out onto the roads in a deliberate attempt to accentuate the inconvenient sights and create a reprehensible eyesore.

Rubbished heads

Yet, all is not at ease in South Africa in what appears to be a problem with placemen in charge of various organisations who appear to have lost the confidence of both their staff and the public.

At South African Airlines, the South African Broadcasting Corporation and the South African Weather Service, people have been demanding the heads of the chiefs and none either by the hand of the government or by plain indifference in defending the indefensible is ready to leave.

In another dispute, the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (Prasa) wants its money back for a train deal that looks as murky as it is incredible along with their attempt to reclaim all remuneration paid to their ex-chief engineer who allegedly falsified his qualifications within the broader issue of the trains being ordered not suitable for South African train lines.

The list goes on about falsification, misrepresentation, dodgy deals, corruption, incompetence, ineptitude, lethargy, obfuscation, impunity and the comedy. Yes, the comedy most exemplified in President Jacob Zuma laughing off the seriousness of giving an account of his stewardship in parliament that it has become part of a skit on television where the idea that leaders are solving the people’s problems is met with that laughter.

Rubbishing legacies

It makes you wonder if this is the same South Africa that gave us such world respected figures as Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Invariably, it appears people are being promoted beyond their competence, others are unable to grow into the responsibilities they have assumed and there is a crisis of leadership that ensures disputes become the norm where no amount of arbitration is possible except where it leads to disaster until the parties exhaust themselves in the squabbles.

I watch South Africa as a land of great promise on the verge of a greater disappointment and loss of opportunity, the symptoms are deeper than anyone is ready to accept, yet, one must commend the judiciary, the public defenders and the watchdogs who seem to be the most able preservers of the democracy at play in this country, loudly seeking accountability and responsibility of those who hold power in all spheres of society.

What South Africa needs the most is great minds given the opportunity to steer this amazing country, but as long as politics, expediency and mediocre minds shown up by more competent people remain in charge, you can expect that the rubbish on the streets is only a symptom of the rubbish in the deeper recesses of the national psyche, and that is a great shame.

Rubbish elections or elections rubbish

In a week or two

Surely, the irony could not have been lost on any Nigerian, a person with a Nigerian heritage or relationship living in the United Kingdom.

The local elections would take place in a few days and the issue that is exciting the people and the campaigners is that of either collecting rubbish weekly or fortnightly.

The weekly collection deals with the issue of smells and vermin whilst in some way encouraging laxity in recycling and costing councils fortunes in landfill charges. The fortnightly collections do the opposite and the people are not happy with having to keep their rubbish for long periods especially in the heat of the approaching summer. Fair point.

Well, 4 out of 10 councils now do the fortnightly collections and there is a possibility that the Carbon Nazis would get into the heads of the administrators forcing them to install electronic chips on the bins (some bins already have them but have been vandalised) to record dumping and assess charges.

Somehow, someone is not comfortable with this revolt from the shires and is trying to make this issue become insignificant - Let's see.

Before I digress, did I see the rubbish of an election in Nigeria and an election on rubbish about to sweep the United Kingdom? Such, is the mystery of democracy.