Are townships a deserted wreckage?

Source: forbesindia.com

My home town(ship), Sebokeng, in the Vaal Triangle... What a timid place I came from! From an outside vantage point, It seems ok. But internally, Sebokeng is structurally fear mongering, at best.

• We respect people particularly because they're from out of town - they must be better, we subconsciously believe.
• We believe we are destined for marriage, a four-roomed house, kids, and maybe a second hand car; and then we wait for the pension payout to extend the house (or fit "big windows", a  proper red stoep, a decorative steel fence, and get the house roughcast plastered). Until then, we settle squarely in our routine of socializing and going to earn a salary (any job that lets you pay the loan shark, bank loan, stokvel, friends you owe, etc...)
• We are Christians via our parents or some family member(s). Someone's got to keep the tithe payment account going so we get buried when we die.
• Talking about accounts, everything we own is acquired via a rent-to-buy account: Edgars, Jet, etc; Joshua Doore (yes we believe we've got an uncle in him). Banks are there for the purpose of home/vehicle Finance and personal loans. Then there are the loan shark accounts...
• Of course, we fit in. We're afraid to be different and we practically never leave the Vaal Triangle.
• The highlights? They have something to do with booze. Bashes, shisanyamas, freshers' balls, etc. SA Breweries really doesn't have to advertize there. We do it for them for free. Many of their products are a status symbol we boast, anyway. The rest of the region's economy is driven by the factories we fantasize about working for all our formative years.
• This cycle is set. Kids are born into this and grow up to raise more such kids. Very few people escape it and its role models
• If we ever do leave the Vaal and discover that the boundaries were only imaginary, our chance of flourishing suddenly multiply and we never go back to the Vaal.

This system has a very firm grip on the locals. You can't live in the Vaal and escape it. All this talk of purpose, potential, passion, careers... That's rhetoric we throw around when we're drunk or when chatting up anyone who sounds smarter than us. In the Vaal, we're too busy keeping up with the latest dance moves, songs (y-tshukutsha), alcoholic beverages (I see my Facebook friends posting about a certain guarana drink. I'm guessing it's booze), and very expensive clothing brands. If we can't afford expensive clothes, we diss those who wear them as being vain and doomed for a bleak future.

This is not entirely unique to the Vaal though. It's just our local flavour of the structural dysfunction that we don't necessarily link to apartheid. We don't think that far unless we're sitting at a local tavern or Shisanyama on a Sunday morning drinking the previous day's hangover away; or of course, if we're chatting up the clever folks that we tell about "passion" and "purpose", and all things intellectual. But that's just our rhetoric.

Our townships are gravely dysfunctional. The 'best' of us - the role models - escape the system and flock into affluent suburbs, in pursuit of the greener pastures. And they drop in for brief visits and then back out of there. We're still township folks at heart though. We continue our drive for status: expensive cars and clothes. Home ownership isn't that big a deal. Well, that's a story for another post. I'm sure you can add your own observations about township life if you hail from one.

Question is: are townships a deserted wreckage we return to for burying our remaining loved ones and subliminally show off our success to everyone there since they didn't believe we'd make it?