Trevor Manuel’s
NPC and his NPC jam on the net, highlighted how desperately short of cognitive
power we are as a nation. I spent some 8 to 10 hours participating in the NPC
jam, what alarmed me the most was the still blatantly racist emotions and opinions
being expressed by people who had at that point enjoyed some 17 years of
freedom, under a government they had chosen. The participants all seemed to
want to be rewarded for the accident of their birth pigmentation. A notion no
doubt fostered and reinforced by the previous three corrupt governments as part
of their long term strategy to remain in power, by keeping the largely
ignorant, electorate labouring under the fear of a possibility of return to
apartheid, should the current party be removed from power. Understandably most
of the suggestions and proposals seemed to be aligned with continuing the
racist fear mongering and highlighted the dangers of a return to white
controlled apartheid.
No one seems to
have stopped to consider the demographics of a truly democratically elected
opposition government, and how it would impact on the well-being of the
majority, if not ALL South African people. Without over labouring the point,
the demographics are simple. Any party wishing to become a majority would have
to be representative of ALL the people, there is no way on earth, or in South Africa
for that matter, for a return to power of a minority racist party. We as a
people would NEVER consider a return to minority rule. It stands to reason,
that even if the ANC were to lose the next election, the government elected by
the people, would be a majority government, and in contrast to the current
corrupt structures, would not be afforded an opportunity to descend into the
kind of all-pervasive carefully concealed power mongering and corrupt practices
that have taken South Africa as an economy to the brink of failure, due to
gross government mismanagement and corruption.
Seen against
that backdrop, the NPC has little hope of success, because the entrenched
cadres of corruption at all levels of government, have no interest in any
change that would affect their vested interests and corrupt deals with
government. Any meaningful change that would truly benefit the Nation of South Africa
is diluted and reshaped to protect current interests. As with many other
African failed states the inevitable collapse is delayed for as long as
possible to allow the members of the Kleptocracy as much time as possible to
leech as much money as possible from the system before it collapses, to allow
them to live their lives of luxury in a another country, benevolent to the
their excesses, and happy to be the custodians of their Billions of Dollars,
unjustly gouged from their people.
We not only need
the NPC’s plans to be implemented, we desperately need a new mind-set not only
from the voters who have traditionally voted the very people who carefully
maintain the mass voting public in poverty, while becoming fabulously rich from
doing so, but a mind-set change among the intellectuals who for some perverse reason,
refuse to see how supporting a structurally corrupt regime in public, keeps the
majority of the people in abject poverty. The very people who despite their
education and obvious enjoyment of the privileges stemming from blatantly
racist practices will like the elite above them, try to maintain the status quo
for as long as possible, little realising that when the masses wake up and make
radical changes to the sitting government, they will not be spared in the
ensuing turmoil and their carefully protected privileges may well also
disappear overnight. As is the case with most artificially privileged classes
their privileges will be the first to evaporate under a new order.
We cannot
continue see people die of starvation in a country with Africa’s largest GDP,
just as we cannot continue to use legislation to keep the people deprived of a
say in the running of the country, and expect 70% of those people to live on
less than a Dollar a day, while government spends Billions in public funds on hotel
accommodation, aircraft charter flights, shady arms deals, dubious global
events like COP17 and police VIP protection, to keep the masses away from them.
The government and not civil society is the responsible agent in maintaining the
chasm between the rich and the poor. The very same government seeks to pass
laws to remain in power for as long possible by concealing the evidence of
their malfeasance by passing draconian information laws in the kangaroo court concealed
as a public forum of government.
The vast
majority of South Africans are kept uninformed of the real issues, while being
mercilessly indoctrinated to maintain the current gross inequities being visited
upon them by the current regime. For every person that can see the injustices,
falls the duty of educating those that can’t see how the exploitation and lies
are keeping them in a state of arrested development.
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