April 09th 2009, South Africans from all angles of life, including those living abroad the boundaries of this country, emerged in various voting stations across the country to cast their votes. Through this processes, a step closer to the maturity of our democracy is foreseen. Although, South Africans have cast their votes and the new governance has taken over, some of the challenges as proclaimed in the Presidential State of Nation’s address are inclusive of poverty, people dying from preventable diseases, lack of sanitation and inconsistent infrastructure, specifically in the rural areas.
Given this situation at hand, for the past 15 years, poverty has been an issue at hand; it has dominated every political party’s election manifesto. But the question that still remains unanswered is, out of 4 electoral process that we have undertaken, of which ANC has always been declared victorious out of all, what has this party done right for its people. I mean, President Jacob Zuma is the 3/4th democratically elected president of the state, but still not much has been achieved in terms of bettering the lives of the poor. Around the 90’s, diseases such as HIV/AIDS were not that much prevalent in our society. But one counts the gradual number that the disease has spread itself across the nation, it is quite shocking.
And I am not implying that our government has perpetrated the occurrence of this situation. My point is, some of the factors that have incited the fast spreading of this disease, are among the list, poverty, lack of proper education and loss of morality among our people. I listened attentively to the recent state of nation’s address, and in one of his addresses, Mr. President said that, there are several projects that are on the pipeline to assist the government to combat the poverty problems, although they were never detailed, by we will just wait and see.
Secondly, the attacks that the premier of Northern Cape had launched against the president were so immoral, given the fact that we claim to be living in a democratic society. In her first mission of attack, Ms Helen Zille made mention of the fact that President Zuma was a health risk. After I read this story on the newspaper headline, I nearly believed the allegations of Mr. Julius Malema that certain people in our society are anti revolutionaries. I know for a fact that politicians always have stance and unfair tricks to defend their “ideologies”, morally or immorally. Later on at the stage, the uMkhonto we Sizwe came forth with a predicament that if the premier continued with her attacks on Zuma, they would declare that province ungovernable. From a distance afar, one can see that democracy is not going to work to the benefit of us all. To my understanding, although I might have the wrong interpretation of the circumstances, I perceive a democracy as a situation where there is one government that governs the whole population through elected political heads. But in this situation, it appears that the statements of Mkhonto came otherwise, when the premier who is the political head of the province declared the province ungovernable by making a state of provincial address prior to the nations’ address.
So the same Premier, who is understandably functions under the administration of the President of the State, undermined the instruction of the administration of the Presidency’s office, irrespective of the political party that she is representing in the county. My believe is that, given the attacks that Helen Zille has launched lately, it is clear that she cannot work with the current government, given her attitude towards Mr. President. In this democratic dispensation, we cannot afford to have the President of the Province and that of the State. Helen Zille is gradually degrading the image of her political party and I believe that the same people that she is representing, they are very ashamed of this type of attitude.
But on a lighter note, I believe that given the fact that June was youth mnth, our leaders must just take all their sharp spears, go back to the youth and listen to their discomforts that will be done in line with commemoration of the spirits of the youth members who died in the name of fighting for the rights of youth of today. In 1976, when the youth of Tsietsi Mashinini, Hector Peterson and the likes took it to the street, they really wanted to emancipate the undemocratic practices of that time. And my honest believe is that, if those heroes were still alive today, they would be disappointed to see the challenges that youth of today is still faced with, given the stage of our democratic revolution. In today’s youth, you can still afford to come across a youth member who cannot get support to acquire a decent education even though he/she has passed high secondary education with flying colours.
The reason I am saying this, there was at some stage in life, one young man who had passed matriculation with bright colours and resorted to selling chickens in the street to sustain the standard of living in his family. Reason being he couldn’t find someone who could sponsor him with money to get into the University. But our so called government can still afford to pump billions of rands into Black Economic Empowerment that is only working for minority in the society. This is a clear indication that, we are still engaged in imizabalazo that will never end, our forefathers fought for our better living territory and today, we are fighting for just a mere standard of living. To me this is a clear contradiction of the charter that the ruling party has declared as a working document towards achieving the needs of the people that it shall govern.
If youth can still be exploited like that and be subjected into literal injustices like this, then one can ask a question to say, why in the first place are we claiming to be living in a transformed territory? Of course, not everyone will have an equal share of our political emancipation, but the fact of the matter is, if our leaders are claiming to have achieved so much, then why are we still faced with problems of educating our future leaders. There are politicians in the various communities we reside in and to my understanding these people are just being ignorant to those who cannot make the end needs. But in any case, I am just thankful to the outsider who came to the rescue of the guy who is now studying towards his Bachelor of Science in University of Venda, even though his dream was nearly shattered, since completing in 1998, he only managed to enroll in 2009.
Another issue that our new government has declared itself to going fight hard against is the issue of corruption. Se, over the time, in my articles, I have spoken on several occasions about this issue post the election. Our government has introduced the so called BEE, which in most cases does business with the same government institutions, who are headed by politicians. The main debate when one looks at the economic policies of ANC you realize they clearly engineered and revolved around capitalism. Now given this situation at hand, political heads being in some cases, members of cabinet and the likes and in control of finances of the institutions that are under their governance, how possible is it going to be for ANC to put a stop on corruption? This is just a wish that is not feasible, because the same political heads are in charge of finances, in charge of appointments of suppliers and in charge of tender committees. I don’t see any stoppage of corruption into this whole process. Take Local Government (Municipalities) institutions as an example: greater part of its leadership is presumably political appointments. So how possible is it that corruption is going to come to an end? That is the reason why I say the wish of government to end corruption will come to an end, although given its economic policies it is not sure how it is going to restrain itself from interfering with public finances? It is so hurtful that the finances that are being rubbished are the tax payers’ monies, which it does not use effectively towards achieving the intended plans.