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My Wife And I Found Ourselves In A National Highway Drama Last Night!

You may want to grab popcorn for this one (yes, it’s that long… but worth it).

So, we were on our way from a surprisingly inspirational funeral of a maverick woman and mother to a close friend of ours.

When she was a young teacher, she single-handedly persuaded the apartheid government to build a school in her community.

She proceeded to tell the then department of education that she would be the principal and would hand pick her staff herself. It sounds like a plot right out of a Hollywood movie script; yet this happened right here on our continental soil.

But I digress…

Southbound about 10 kilometres from our house in our small yet bustling family-friendly town of Howick, we were welcomed by a fleet of traffic police vehicles parked on the roadside with their blue lights flashing, just before the mother of all traffic jams.

We initially thought this was an accident and did not make much of it. Google maps had told us it was a mere eight-minute delay. I had, as I always do, Google maps connected all the time since our departure.

Google didn’t even attempt to detour us from the national highway even though there are plenty of alternative routes along it. I was really mad at Google maps for lying to us.

Little did we know that the traffic jam we were caught in, had started piling up 15 hours earlier, from 2am about 35 kilometres from our spot.

We only found this out two hours into our waiting from our friend who lives in our neighbourhood and had witnessed the traffic drama unfolding. The time was now 9pm.

Did I mention I was mad at Google? Now I was livid.

You see, I had once been caught in a similar catastrophe about a decade ago. I was migrating from Gauteng to KwaZulu-Natal after liquidating my company, retrenching all our employees and had lost everything, including our beautiful suburban townhouse.

My wife and I with our two toddlers packed up all that was left and were on our way to live with my sister-in-law in her two-bedroomed flat. But that’s a story for another day.

A freak snow fall, in the spring Southern Hemisphere of September, had fallen on the Drakensberg mountains, completely sealing the national highway pass, resulting in road closure.

We could hardly sleep in the freezing cold; we had to wrap our two and three year old children and let them lie on top of us. I never wept in my life like I wept that night. It was traumatic!

After our friend’s call, my decade-old traumatic memories triggered a Zulu warrior in me. I immediately resolved I was not going to sleep on the road again.

When I stepped out of the car, the mercury had plummeted to single digits.

Earlier I had taken note on Google maps that we were 2.3km from the next exit. I told my wife I would take a reconnaissance walk to see how we could get out and would call her.

I hit the road like Will Smith after he crash landed on the desert in the first iteration of Men in Black.

As I walked, I noticed that there were only a few trucks that had blocked the left hand yellow emergency lane… if I could negotiate with those at the front of the jam to close the gaps between the trucks, they could eventually make space for these trucks that had strayed into the emergency lane, thinking they would find their way out of this mother of all jams. They were just unfortunately too big to navigate the emergency lane, while a small car would.

After 30 minutes or so of brisk walking, I reached the exit point, and concluded that there was indeed a way out; all we had to do was negotiate with some truckers to make some space.

I immediately called my wife to start finding her way into the emergency lane.

She told fellow motorists next to her that there was a way out but required some negotiations with truckers to close the gaps in between the trucks. Two males in a posh Mercedes Benz immediately enrolled. The mother of all negotiations thus began.

From the other side, as I made my way back, assured there was a way out, I told every motorist I could see that if they didn’t want to sleep on the road tonight, they could negotiate for the truckers to close the gaps in between the trucks and find their way to the emergency lane.

That turned out to be drama in its own right. Some motorists would not even look at me. Here I was, the bearer of good news, yet spectacularly ignored.

I suppose it was out of fear. Talk about being an African male at night.

It almost seems the posher the car, the higher the likelihood that they wouldn’t even heed my call for attention.

It immediately reminded me of Jesus’ mission to bring the good news to humankind… it was precisely the privileged that rejected Jesus Christ.

After all, Jesus had been reared in the backwaters of Galilee, born out wedlock to a working-class family. Who was He to claim to have been God? How could a nobody like Him dare make such claims?

But I digress again.

So, on my way back, my mission was twofold: bring the good news to the stranded motorists and ask the truckers to close the gaps between the trucks. My wife and her recruitees were doing exactly the same on the other side.

When I started seeing cars going past me, I was jubilant… our plan was working.

As the motorists whizzed past me, little did they know I was their co-liberator. Some of them even flashed their lights at me with irritation as I was squeezing my way between them and the trucks as I made my way back. They say love is blind, but what’s abundantly truer is that privilege is as blind as a bat.

After about 20 minutes into my liberators’ walk back and a couple dozen motorists my wife and her team liberated on her side, I finally reached them. The time was less than an hour before midnight.

On our way home, my wife and I sorrowfully mused about the dearth of leadership in our country.

The traffic police who would have known what was going on, never bothered to divert small car traffic off the closed national highway.

Some of the motorists had children and the elderly in their cars… and might easily have spent a cold night on a choked road. And perhaps some did, as we’ve no idea what happened to those behind us.

Perhaps God had enrolled us into a master class about leadership… that which we leave undone, we cannot expect to be miraculously done.

As I lay in my bed, I found myself being acutely aware that those pothole-riddled roads in my neighbourhood are not going to automatically fix themselves; or the dilapidated water infrastructure with just as frequent water outages as Eskom’s electricity, shall not somehow come right without leadership.

All these crises need leadership to be addressed and leadership begins with me!

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