Those of us who gave our lives, in however large or small ways, to banishing apartheid, entrusted you to uplift the masses. You have done that, slightly. That’s the good part. Everyone, by now knows the bad parts.
The very first thing any government must do, is look after us. That means, defend us from enemies,and look after our health. The rest comes after those two things.
But, the looting began. Of course, you blew it, literally, on boys’ toys. The best defence would have been to spend those billions on education, but we understand that you didn’t want that. You didn’t, because people might become smart enough to see through you and vote elsewhere. You wanted us to stay poor, because you know that (because we are poor) we love anything for mahala. So, you come with wearables, food packs, and those insulting R350 grants, which buy us one “plestiek” of groceries, once per month.
At first, your intentions were clear, and you didn't do so badly. True, your leader had no idea how government worked, but how could he, after sitting in jail for 27 years? Hospitals country wide ground to a halt, filled with mothers wanting their kids seen to, immediately. Still, child care and grants came about, and that is civilised and changed childrens' fortunes forever. Beyond that, you went back to sleep, then yawned after 31 years and thousands of unemployed doctors, and came up with a plan for national health. Funny you should come up with that after wrecking the economny so we do not have the tax base to pay for it.
I remain a socialist, but get real: defence and looking after the aged, sick and vulnerable need tax money, and tax money comes from businesses profiting and exporting. It is not your money. Get this into your dull skulls. YOU WORK FOR US. We entrust that money to be spent on us, not on you or your hopeless party, or Louis Vutton handbags. We all had high hopes for you, but, looking back, you rode the wave that was there before, and did nothing, other than useful Gautrain, and useless Sanral e-tolls. En kyk hoe lyk daie goed nou!{Putting it simply, what gains were made came solely from apartheid being out of the way. Individuals did their usual strong South African bit, with their new found opportunities. You guys did nothing, or less than nothing. Is there such a thing as negative nothing?
Having squandered everything on boats that don't float and planes that don't fly, and also after 31 years, you wake up and come with an education bill that once again makes us wonder what you were smoking: Compulsory sex education for all children from 0 to 9 years of age. Seriously?.
Meantime, we obliged. We have stayed poor. Not as bad as we were, true, but we are poor in money, poor in education, poor in ethics, morals, law and behaviour. Rich in jealousy, fragile ego, xenophobia and killing.
But something unforeseen happened. A lot of us got educated and smart, anyway. Our top sportspersons went to model C schools, and are running ragged through other world teams. We supply surplus cricketers and rugby players to many other countries. Notice that model C schools are not big on soccer, so this did not help with your favourite ball sport (you know, the one for which all the white elephant stadiums were built).Our players of that sport have instead become famous for striking for higher pay the day before cup matches, whining about not being paid the same as ‘overseas’ players, and wanting bonuses for 'no goals'.
Your predictable, spiteful and jealous response is to come up with an education bill that intends to whack both private and model C schools into oblivion, and
lower every school in our country to your standard
, which is bafana bafana 30% pass
style. Eish! Do you, maybe, just like being laughed at?
Time is up. Note, I said it is simple, not easy. It is dead simple. All you need to do is digitize the justice system. Once your criminal class ceases to make dockets vanish, they will lurch into the background. People will get caught, and get court. Normality will slowly return. When people in the street believe, and then come to know, that they and everyone else are treated equally and fairly, stealing and killing will cease to look like answers. The construction mafia will be killed or jailed or both, and their ilk in every field of crime will go the same way. With these louts on the back foot, people will have half a chance to hang on to what they have earned and worked for, and sanity will return. Business will flourish, and with it, tax collection. With tax collection, there will be money again for education, health, roads and rail. It took 31 years to destroy, but will not take 31 years to restore, because restoring it makes sense, and destroying it didn’t.
This is not something you have a good record for doing. In the 1980s, as unions developed and grew, the one thing they were hopeless at was capturing membership details. Funders gave them PCs to do it. But these gathered dust or were used for sporadic Freecell games.
When Nkozana Dlamini-Zuma took over home affairs, she brought about Yet Another Multi-Million Rand Commission of Enquiry. Its finding was that “staff did not understand the technology”. Money was spent on rectifying that, but it did not help for long. My old motto “If it is too hard, you are doing it wrong” comes to mind. Whatever training was done did not help, and iWomaFeza once again fell on its side until the GNU, when a DA minister fixed it, in the space of one year. Simple. Not easy, but Simple. I am no DA guy: what they did was what anyone could do. You just need to get real work done on a PC. Data capturers can be trained to touch type in two weeks, and then they are on their way. I know, because that's how I started. It was both simple and easy.
Of course, because there isn’t a lot of talent, vision and planning about, the default activity in the room is the usual
. Everybody thinks s/he
understands costs. Actually, there are two kinds of cost: the cost of doing something, and the cost of not doing it. Of these two, every Tom, Dick and Harry knows
the price of everything and the value of nothing.It isn’t nearly as easy to understand how we can’t afford NOT to do it. There is no money for anything any more. Well, tough. There just has to be for this. The money, as Thabo Mbeki once said “must be found”. It will be. There is much more of it floating around than there seems to be, but nobody will part with it unless it goes to someone, unlike you, who knows what to do with it. Home Affairs controls databases of every citizen of SA: in SA terms, you can’t get much bigger than databases of 60 million people, plus the deceased in archives, yet they were turned around in a year. The Justice system is smaller. So, don’t whine about backlogs. Pitch up, capture the work. Put one foot in front of the other, don’t look up, and it will be done before you know it.
We all love a little Joseph Shabalala and Ladysmith Black Mambazo in our daily lives: as a nation, our hearts are homeless. We
need to be right
again. Being wrong all the time, like now, is a dull ache. As a feeling, it is scary-similar to apartheid. We can marry who we love now, but
what's the point to marriage when we are exiled from our own hearts and minds, and platsak as well?
All it takes is for every citizen to know s/he has as much chance of justice as the grootkoppe with their blue lights, and for every blue light thug to find that s/he is one step, like most of us, from homelessness or jail.
So, Digitise the Justice system. Fix it, and us. If you can't, somebody else will. Very soon. Maybe too soon for your comfort. Here is a helpful tip: check your Swiss bank balance, and relocation costs. Somebody out there wants you. We don't.