An honest Sona would thank citizens for doing the state’s work

Imagine astate of the nation addressdelivered without triumph or ceremony. The president rises, not to announce renewal, but to offer thanks. He thanks households for installing solar panels that kept the lights on when the grid could not.

He thanks parents who found ways to send their children to private schools, as public classrooms became more crowded and less reliable. He thanks communities that drilled wells whentaps ran dry, and businesses that paved roads, fixed wells, installed street lights and hired private security as policing quietly retreated. That moment would not feel like a rupture.

It would feel familiar because South Africa has been living with this logic for some time, even if it has never been spoken so plainly. The country is not marked by sudden collapse, but by a slow recalibration of expectation. What once provoked outrage is met with adjustment.

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The absence has been normalised, and coping has replaced demanding. Private substitution is often celebrated as resilience. Households are praised for their ingenuity.

Businesses are applauded for acting where the state cannot. Communities are encouraged to be self-reliant. These narratives sound affirming but obscure a deeper retreat.

When families must become energy planners, water managers, security co-ordinators and education strategists simply to live with dignity, the burden of governance has moved decisively downward. The work of the state has been absorbed into private life, quietly and unevenly. At first, this arrangement seems manageable.

Daily routines continue and some neighbourhoods remain functional. Economic activity persists, though unevenly. Yet beneath this surface stability lies a growing sense of loss of services, but also of shared expectation.

Citizenship no longer carries a dependable promise of care or protection from the state. Rights remain intact in law but fragile in practice. What replaces them is a culture of coping, in which people learn not to expect too much and to organise their lives around institutional absence.

This withdrawal is deeply unequal in its effects. Those with resources exit public systems and construct parallel ones. Those without remain exposed to failure with few alternatives.

Over time, inequality becomes spatial and visceral. Almost all areas are defined by decay, while others retreat behind the walls of private provision. The country is divided into zones of functionality and zones of endurance.

This is not only inefficient, but emotionally corrosive. It teaches people that belonging is conditional and that dignity must be purchased.

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