It’s strange how these words, granted with the added impetus provided by an old Pioneer, cutting through the silence of a cold dark winter’s night, are not greatly appreciated at half past one on a Sunday morning. Uniting in less-than-silent accord, faceless voices inform me what they want to do to – and with – me, and it is not to ask for a dance.

I am sitting in my dormitory room, but am not alone. I am barely conscious, having been awoken only minutes before. I have been joined by Anton, my oldest university friend, and Willem, who, depending on your philosophy or religion, are exploring greener pastures.

It is 1987 – not a particularly memorable year, but what is causing the ruckus? The song contributing to all this was released on October 28, 1977. Incidentally, it is October 28 as I sit down to write this column. The album was released by Virgin Records after A&M Records had terminated their contract with the band just four days after the record was recorded.

Back to the ruckus – months before, I had returned from the then West Germany (the Wall had yet to fall). I had returned with an unknown machine, a compact disc player, and four CDs. At the time, I was a rock star – literary – and would retain this status for many months before the first CD players arrived. The CD playing was my fifth. I had acquired it weeks before in a bargain bin at Dion’s (now DionWired), which had displayed CDs before the CD players were on offer.

The song was by the punk rock group, The Sex Pistols, and was from its 1977 album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, which was recently rated the seventy-ninth best album of all time. At the time, both the CD player and the CDs were not appreciated. I do not have to tell you what the CD did to vinyl records. That said, there are those who do not want to see vinyl records die. But I fear this is just nostalgia. Could vinyl records be the equivalent of coelacanths – the living fossils of the sea? (Coelacanths were considered to have become extinct in the Cretaceous period, along with dinosaurs, but a live specimen was caught in South Africa in 1938.)

As I listen to the album again, this time not on CD – which has largely been relegated, not to the past, but to the brink – but on the World Wide Web, I am reminded of another track that, I fear, is a track South Africa is pursuing. The track is Anarchy in the UK, whose lyrics go: “Cause I want to be anarchy . . . How many ways to get what you want, I use the best, I use the rest . . . I use anarchy.”

Considering the events of the week beginning October 23, Anarchy in South Africa, or rather Economic Anarchy in South Africa, is not misplaced. The first mentioned, the main attraction, is being superseded by its economic trailer. As has become customary since 1994, a poem is offered in the introduction to the Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement (MTBPS), which is further proof that we prioritise words instead of action. Unfortunately, singer FR David’s international smash hit, Words, seems to be lost on South African politicians. While, for Trade and Industry Minister Dr Rob Davies, words do not come easily, this is not the case when it comes to South African politicians.

Adding insult to injury, the latest economic approach seems to be to create a perception of honesty and to acknowledge the difficulty facing South Africa, but not to acknowledge the elephant in the room – State capture. This is best achieved by resorting to the behaviour of a feathered friend who should be elevated to the status of our national bird.

If you have not invested the time to read this year’s iteration of the MTBPS and its associated documents, you should, for the analysis therein is terminal. If this road is being pursued, then Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer, released on October 31, 1986, would prove most prophetic: “Woah, we’re halfway there, Woah, livin’ on a prayer.”

There is someone who is not living on a prayer, though – he has reached the Big 50 on this very day, November 10. Anton. Fifty is but a number. It is not a reference number; it is merely two big digits. Anyone telling you otherwise, flick them two digits.

But South Africa can, and has the potential to, be great once again, provided that its people are willing to fight for what is right, fair and just, and not be suppressed and taken advantage of.

I recently came across The Great Boer War, a nonfiction book by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that was published in September 1900, about two years before the war ended – in 1902. At the time the book was published, the British prematurely believed that the war was all but over. With this in mind, Doyle offered the following insight into the boers, which is striking, considering that it was written by an ‘enemy’: “Take a community of Dutchmen of the type of those who defended themselves for 50 years against all the power of Spain at a time when Spain was the greatest power in the world. Intermix with them a strain of those inflexible French Huguenots who gave up home and fortune and left their country forever at the time of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The product must obviously be one of the most rugged, virile, unconquerable races ever seen upon earth.

“Take this formidable people and train them for seven generations in constant warfare against savage men and ferocious beasts, in circumstances under which no weakling could survive, place them so that they acquire exceptional skill with weapons and in horsemanship, give them a country which is eminently suited to the tactics of the huntsman, the marksman, and the rider. “Then, finally, put a finer temper upon their military qualities by a dour fatalistic Old Testament religion and an ardent and consuming patriotism. Combine all these qualities and all these impulses in one individual, and you have the modern boer – the most formidable antagonist who ever crossed the path of Imperial Britain. Our military history has largely consisted in our conflicts with France, but Napoleon and all his veterans have never treated us so roughly as these hard-bitten farmers with their ancient theology and their inconveniently modern rifles.”