67 minutes of reflection

What it means for me to be South African for 67 minutes out of one day of every year, or every day for that matter.

After 18 years of commemorative chest beating by the ruling party, I still see that over 20 million people live below the R10 per day breadline. But the ruling elite live in the most opulent luxury our taxes can buy.

Millions of youth have no jobs, partly because the economy is not growing and partly because their education does not qualify them to do anything, other than be unemployed in despair of ever finding jobs. Ministers and mayors and other functionaries of the ruling party think nothing of voting themselves 34% annual increases though.

Thousands of youths have been denied an education for several years due to Education Department mismanagement and corruption, including inter alia the failure to provide textbooks and teachers with suitable qualifications. The ruling elite live off education tenders and send their children to private schools at taxpayers’ expense.

There are more people killed by HIV annually than in the imperialist war in Iran and Afghanistan which are active war zones. The hospitals which could help the fight against HIV are for the most part dilapidated and neglected, understaffed and ill-equipped. The fight against HIV is relegated to a minor irritation as long as the elite can spend tax money on test kits that don’t work. Incidentally the Elite State Employees Medical Aid is the best in the world. They would not be seen dead in a State Hospital.

A woman is raped in South Africa every 27 seconds. This is the rape capital of the world; despite civil society efforts to reduce these horrific acts, the police are not inclined to direct their efforts to this. Social workers and NGO’s relate incidents where the police join in gang rapes instead of stopping them, in many cases they partner with the pimps and human traffickers for profit. The elite have platoons of bodyguards, 16 000 thugs in uniform to protect the 3000 or so kleptocrats who voted themselves these privileges.

The South African economy is dying a slow death, while companies hoard large cash reserves, estimated between R500 Billion to R1.2 Trillion reluctant to invest in the economy, due to the inherent instability of the current government, for want of a better less flattering word. Foreign companies and investors are not interested in investing in South Africa anymore. A combination of racist employment policies and extreme government corruption has effectively driven away most Foreign Direct Investment. The corrupt political elite continue to try to gouge more revenue out of a shrinking economic pool.

Any economic growth is stymied by a phalanx of racist laws designed to discriminate against 8% of the population, which in turn has led to a reduction of vital skills in South Africa, as people of undesirable races, chose to take their skills abroad. Corruption is the order of the day, in State as well as private companies with as much as 25% of GDP lost to corruption. This represents enough to provide every South African with free education to tertiary level, free health care for life, longer than the current 42 years average life expectancy, and free public transport in all areas.

Every South African should spend the next 67 minutes thinking on how best to correct the wrongs which our legacy has bestowed upon us all.

The National Planning Commission and Other Myths and Fables.

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.