Traffic Light Etiquette

South Africa has a poverty problem. And our poverty problem has many causes - current and historical. Politic and economic. With a myriad everyday complications: lack of education and skills training, migration to the cities by the rural poor, drought, families shattered by AIDS and, of course, graft and greed.

Sometimes I am afraid to look too directly into the face of all the need in this country. I'm afraid that what I will see will give me vertigo. Start a slide into hopelessness. Instead, I try to focus on the problem's knees, I try to look for ways to keep them from wobbling. Because I know, once the knees go, it's all over.

So, I support small businesses wherever I find them. People here are genius at finding ways to feed themselves. Parking lot stalls selling single cigarettes and oranges. A telephone shack in a township. Third-hand clothes, patched and buttoned sold from a blanket on the sidewalk. No opportunity is wasted. Including that mandatory stop red at a red traffic light: from newspapers and cell phone chargers, through beaded flowers, fruit and sunglasses to knock-off Liverpool strips and bottled water, you'll be offered it all

Then there are the beggars - with the blind at a premium; being led from car to car by a sighted person (usually a child). The transaction is slick: a quick flip of the coins from car to hand, a nanosecond weighing up of the offering. And an all-seeing smile of gratitude.

I consider these people to be the new entrepreneurs. They're small business owners. My favourites are the folks who sell Cape Town's homeless magazine, The Big Issue, and the joke sheets. They're legally at that light - they have joined an organization, lobbied for a pitch and show up regularly to keep it.

I watch them work six days a week, in all weathers, and always cheerfully. So I buy a few magazines a month and get my laughs every week - usually from the same vendors. And I occasionally add a flower to my dashboard collection. Or buy a pack of avos. When I don't want anything, or it all feels like its becoming overwhelming - a smile and a shake of the head usually gets the salesman moving on to the next car. They I know I can't support everyone - that I do what I can. And I am not alone, a lot of people do.

But not the two guys in the black Porsche Cayenne on Roeland Street yesterday afternoon at 1.00pm. They engaged the vendor in conversation, boasting that their car cost over a million rand, and then refused to buy his magazine saying they "had no money".

The pair of you should be ashamed. That man was shivering outside your big-ass car's window. He had no shoes on. And you two, gold Aviator wearing, fools just laughed and drove off.

Was that what the struggle was about for you? Being able to rub someone's nose in your new-found fatcatness? You are another reason that the poor remain poor. You're too damned mean to share the riches "the new South Africa" has brought you. I was mortified for you and I bet your parents and grandparents would be too.