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DEAR South Africa, here we are again. The mixture as usual, as doctors’ scripts used to say – although a little red-hot pepper chilli has been added for taste. I anticipate much amusement from seeing the antics of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) in parly.
There was plenty in this election campaign to irritate and annoy, from the unhappy speed date between Helen Zille and Mamphela Ramphele to the intrusive Facebook fans of Ubuntu, Michael Tellinger’s one-man show (I did find myself wondering how the author of Slave Species of God would perform in parliament).
One of the things that riled me most was the ANC response to Ronnie Kasrils and Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge’s campaign to get South Africans to vote for another party or to spoil their vote. Talk about playing the man and not the ball!
I no longer buy the Star newspaper, so I did not see the original, but Chris Roper in the Mail & Guardian reports on Public Service Minister Lindiwe Sisulu’s article, published on election day, no less, in which she threatens South Africans who spoil their ballot papers with jail and gives the game away (as Roper points out) in this wonderful quote: “[Kasrils] has chosen the path of cheap populism and criminality as his way of getting back at the ANC for denying him access to the fat-cat perquisites he so fondly longs for.”
Right. So now we have an admission that this is really what you’re all there for – the fat-cat perquisites. Groan. Don’t you have a savvy PR person to at least weed out the more egregious statements, Minister?
There’s a devastated area a ten-minute drive from my home-based office. It’s hard to unpick exactly what happened there, but it seems that the authorities engaged in poor and insensitive communication and negotiation with the residents at the outset, to which, in a rapidly developing situation, was added uncontrolled criminality (gangsters and illegal mining operations among them).
The result has been absolute mayhem and the destruction of numerous buildings in a matter of weeks. The area looks like London in the Blitz – and I’m not exaggerating at all.
It’s just one event among hundreds –as the Social Change Research Unit of the University of Johannesburg (UJ) pointed out in its report earlier this year, there’s been a service delivery protest at least every second day, somewhere in the country, in recent times.
In the same week that I saw pictures of this devastation on my doorstep, I also saw pictures of a palace a local tycoon has built in Gauteng. Believe me, it makes aristocratic Downton Abbey from the hit BBC TV series look like some pretentious over-decorated suburban house. It is stark, staring evidence of the massive gulf of inequality in this country.
And that has not miraculously disappeared just because you won the election, my dear friends in the ANC. I did not expect you to approach a loss in this election, but I had hoped that you got something around 60% - perhaps even dipping into the upper fifties – in order to give you the kind of shock that might wake you up, might give you an idea of how close we are to the edge.
As it is, while you celebrate your win and speak creamy phrases about being given a “mandate by the electorate”, I would urge you to remember that about 37 people out of every hundred did NOT vote for you. You as the ruling party have an obligation to act in their interests too, you know.
Professor Peter Alexander, the research chair in social change at UJ, is not alone when he speaks of a “ticking time bomb”; I heard the ominous ticking sound when I saw the Facebook discussions some of my young friends were having just before 7 May – most of whom appear to have voted EFF, by the way.
That ticking time bomb is the reason I have embarked on a course of reading of out-of-the-box economists and thinkers. I don’t think we have the luxury of too much time to take mitigating action in this country. We have to start offering hope to the people living on the other side of that widening gulf.
One of the saddest things I heard last year was a comment from a miner in the North West who had been sweating his guts out daily for 17 years, and had hardly seen his remuneration keep pace with inflation.
He spoke of a daughter he has who, he thinks, could be a doctor; if he could see hope for her, he said, it would be all right, but to keep working this way, in a never-ending stream of underground days away from his family, without even the chance of securing a better life for his children, made him feel desperate.
I think it would be an excellent idea if you, our new government, called for ideas and suggestions from the electorate as to how these issues should be tackled – and even better if you showed yourself willing to accept and consider carefully suggestions that seem shocking and strange, from basic income grants to changes to the banking system, from different ways of making land reform effective to new ways of taxation.
And let’s debate these things transparently.
- Fin24
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own.
There was plenty in this election campaign to irritate and annoy, from the unhappy speed date between Helen Zille and Mamphela Ramphele to the intrusive Facebook fans of Ubuntu, Michael Tellinger’s one-man show (I did find myself wondering how the author of Slave Species of God would perform in parliament).
One of the things that riled me most was the ANC response to Ronnie Kasrils and Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge’s campaign to get South Africans to vote for another party or to spoil their vote. Talk about playing the man and not the ball!
I no longer buy the Star newspaper, so I did not see the original, but Chris Roper in the Mail & Guardian reports on Public Service Minister Lindiwe Sisulu’s article, published on election day, no less, in which she threatens South Africans who spoil their ballot papers with jail and gives the game away (as Roper points out) in this wonderful quote: “[Kasrils] has chosen the path of cheap populism and criminality as his way of getting back at the ANC for denying him access to the fat-cat perquisites he so fondly longs for.”
Right. So now we have an admission that this is really what you’re all there for – the fat-cat perquisites. Groan. Don’t you have a savvy PR person to at least weed out the more egregious statements, Minister?
There’s a devastated area a ten-minute drive from my home-based office. It’s hard to unpick exactly what happened there, but it seems that the authorities engaged in poor and insensitive communication and negotiation with the residents at the outset, to which, in a rapidly developing situation, was added uncontrolled criminality (gangsters and illegal mining operations among them).
The result has been absolute mayhem and the destruction of numerous buildings in a matter of weeks. The area looks like London in the Blitz – and I’m not exaggerating at all.
It’s just one event among hundreds –as the Social Change Research Unit of the University of Johannesburg (UJ) pointed out in its report earlier this year, there’s been a service delivery protest at least every second day, somewhere in the country, in recent times.
In the same week that I saw pictures of this devastation on my doorstep, I also saw pictures of a palace a local tycoon has built in Gauteng. Believe me, it makes aristocratic Downton Abbey from the hit BBC TV series look like some pretentious over-decorated suburban house. It is stark, staring evidence of the massive gulf of inequality in this country.
And that has not miraculously disappeared just because you won the election, my dear friends in the ANC. I did not expect you to approach a loss in this election, but I had hoped that you got something around 60% - perhaps even dipping into the upper fifties – in order to give you the kind of shock that might wake you up, might give you an idea of how close we are to the edge.
As it is, while you celebrate your win and speak creamy phrases about being given a “mandate by the electorate”, I would urge you to remember that about 37 people out of every hundred did NOT vote for you. You as the ruling party have an obligation to act in their interests too, you know.
Professor Peter Alexander, the research chair in social change at UJ, is not alone when he speaks of a “ticking time bomb”; I heard the ominous ticking sound when I saw the Facebook discussions some of my young friends were having just before 7 May – most of whom appear to have voted EFF, by the way.
That ticking time bomb is the reason I have embarked on a course of reading of out-of-the-box economists and thinkers. I don’t think we have the luxury of too much time to take mitigating action in this country. We have to start offering hope to the people living on the other side of that widening gulf.
One of the saddest things I heard last year was a comment from a miner in the North West who had been sweating his guts out daily for 17 years, and had hardly seen his remuneration keep pace with inflation.
He spoke of a daughter he has who, he thinks, could be a doctor; if he could see hope for her, he said, it would be all right, but to keep working this way, in a never-ending stream of underground days away from his family, without even the chance of securing a better life for his children, made him feel desperate.
I think it would be an excellent idea if you, our new government, called for ideas and suggestions from the electorate as to how these issues should be tackled – and even better if you showed yourself willing to accept and consider carefully suggestions that seem shocking and strange, from basic income grants to changes to the banking system, from different ways of making land reform effective to new ways of taxation.
And let’s debate these things transparently.
- Fin24
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own.
