There is a specific, cloying brand of 'heartwarming' news that makes me want to gargle industrial-grade bleach. You’ve seen the headlines. They usually involve a person performing a basic biological function under conditions that would make a medieval peasant weep with pity, only for the media to frame it as a 'testament to the human spirit.' The recent events in Mbaula village, outside Giyani, are the latest entry in this anthology of desperate cope. A woman went into labor. The village was cut off by floods. A community health worker stepped in. The baby survived. Cue the applause from the comfortable, the dry, and the intellectually stagnant.

Let’s strip away the sentimental varnish and look at the rotting wood beneath. The fact that a village can be 'cut off' from essential healthcare by a bit of rain in the 21st century is not a 'challenge to be overcome'; it is a screaming indictment of a government that has spent decades treating infrastructure as a theoretical concept rather than a physical necessity. In Limpopo, the Giyani area is famous for one thing: the Giyani Water Project, a black hole of corruption that has swallowed billions of rands while leaving residents as thirsty as they were under the previous regime. It is a masterpiece of bureaucratic performance art. They can’t seem to get water into the pipes, yet when the sky decides to dump water onto the roads, the entire system collapses like a wet cardboard box.

The 'miracle' here isn't the birth—birth is an anatomical inevitability that occurs regardless of whether or not you have a functional bridge. The miracle is the audacity of the South African state to continue existing while its citizens are forced to play 'Frontier Midwife' because the roads have reverted to their ancestral state of primordial sludge. We call the woman who assisted 'a community health worker,' a title that serves as a convenient euphemism for 'someone we haven’t bothered to properly equip, pay, or support, but upon whom we dump the entire burden of our systemic failure.' These workers are the thin, frayed line holding back total societal dissolution, and we reward them by making them navigate floods to deliver babies on kitchen tables.

The Right will look at this and mutter about the 'good old days' while ignoring that their preferred version of the past was built on the deliberate, systemic exclusion of these very villages. The Left will engage in a frantic round of performative empathy, tweeting their 'outrage' from air-conditioned offices in Sandton, perhaps even starting a hashtag before returning to their overpriced lattes. Neither side actually cares that Mbaula is an island of neglect. To the politicians, the floods are a 'Force Majeure'—a convenient legal shield that allows them to shrug and say, 'Nature is so unpredictable,' as if rain were a brand-new phenomenon that hasn’t occurred annually for several billion years.

Consider the existential horror of being born into this. You arrive in a world that can’t even maintain a gravel road to your doorstep. Your first breath is taken in a village that the state only remembers during election cycles when the yellow, blue, or red t-shirts are handed out like beads to the 'natives.' The child is born into a cycle of 'resilience,' a word that has been weaponized by the ruling class to romanticize the suffering of the poor. If you call someone 'resilient,' you don't have to fix the bridge. You don't have to pave the road. You just have to wait for the next flood and find another community worker to perform a low-cost miracle.

This isn't a story about a successful birth; it is a story about a failed state. The floods didn't 'cut off' Mbaula village; the state abandoned it long ago, and the water simply made the abandonment visible to the naked eye. We are witnessing the slow-motion de-evolution of society, where the heights of technological achievement—smartphones, global connectivity, space tourism—exist alongside a reality where a woman’s survival during childbirth depends entirely on whether her neighbor can swim. It is a grotesque juxtaposition that should embarrass anyone with a functioning prefrontal cortex. But it won't. Instead, we’ll see more stories about 'heroism' and 'hope,' while the mud thickens and the bridges remain unbuilt, and the next generation of 'resilient' victims is ushered into the muck.