A conversation among 20-somethings that is always a no go area when standing with a group of a friends is politics. However, writing it down may prove somewhat therapeutic for some like myself who is unable to voice their opinion in any other form without having to look in the eyes around glazing over. Why? Because what can possibly be said that we don’t already know, haven’t thought and haven’t dismissed with the comment. ‘What is the point?’ Maybe there isn’t one, but unless we start writing down our thoughts or god forbid, start talking about it. Nothing will change.
South Africa, with its first world technology, communication network and its interesting first world policies being put on the table that in any first world country would be welcomed by the public and seen as the politicians earning their tax paid wages. Policies around global debt and managing the funding of government paid healthcare being the more popular topics among the countries that do not face starvation of their people, a level of employment that makes up 80% of their working age citizens or the horrific increase in crimes made for horror movies that if one dare open that link on new24.com or any other news site would have night mares haunting their every sleepless night. No these are the countries that can afford to deliberate about branding on cigarette packets or how to effectively toll roads that 75% of working individuals use to get to work because they have jobs to go to.
South Africa, in all that it is, is not a first world. We are lying to ourselves and the world in the end as all lies before have proven will harm us in all ways that may prove to be what sends us into yet another African country that could have been wonderful.
Government is very quick to blame businesses and the very citizens for it failures. We are too demanding, too hasty, wrongs of the past must be righted first. This translating into the very elite lining their pockets and being able to sleep at night as they feel it is owed to them because their grandfather had suffered at the hand of an unjust society.
We all know that what happened in the past was not right. A cliché of two wrongs became a cliché because those who did not heed the warning ultimately ended up falling victim to it until the all to familiar, ohhhhhh moment occurs.
This is where we are now. The damage is done. The revenge of the few have lead to a country that fewer people have housing, clean water, education and health care than in apartheid. What is worse now is that there is a feeling of despair among those who know it but can’t say it for the fear of being a racist. However when the poor do not even need to pick up a newspaper to state the obvious decline in our basic rights as a society start complaining that apartheid was better because at least they got some of what was needed to live. You know our democracy is failing miserably.
We do not need brand new expensive roads that look bright and shiny and can be seen from space. We do not need to ban branding cigarette boxes, or Health tariffs that set by a board that is unable to enforce it. We do not need to spend millions changing roads names because the others were reminders of the wrong side of the past.
The people need clean water, Education and food. There needs to be programs to assist the poor in supporting their families while getting an education they have been denied in previous years. A women needs to be able to go home at night and feel she is protected by the law from those who see women as less than equal. A child needs to be able to be a child and not a bread winner when their mother and father die from a disease that a decent healthcare could have delayed.
These thoughts are new ones, these worries not being voiced for the first time. This is however my first time writing them down as I am a South African who loves my country’s potential. avidly following the news of where we are headed and have since I was able to understand it. I have not lost hope that our Government will see the error in its ways and start trying to change. I am not saying I haven’t seen glimpses of it in the recent past. I am simply stating that if just maybe those who are deployed to departments of irrelevant policies that have no affect on what is our basic right as human beings and citizens of this country were used in the hundreds of thousands of vacancies in the departments that matter. Maybe just maybe we can turn this whole derailment around and become the country we all know is there waiting to break through this cloud of negativity and the facade we can no longer put on.
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