By Thamsanqa D Malinga
I have written extensively on the gloomy situation our country is facing. Like other social and political commentators, I have bemoaned the scrupulous leadership that we have given the responsibility, through our vote, of steering this country.
At some point I wrote calling on South Africans to rise at the lack of or rather the seemingly unwillingness of the government to make this country the African dream that our grandparents dreamed of and the dream they were sold in the run-up to the dawn of democracy.
Of late I have found myself being taken back to words that a friend uttered in a moment of conspicuous consumption of the waters from pharaoh’s barrels. About a decade ago, on a Friday evening, while having a discussion, my friend dropped what would be a bombshell – “we should have an exit strategy, I tell you”, Lehlohonolo Mphuthi quipped, “even if it means taking our families to the UK and we start life there waiting on tables. At least that would mean we have taken our children to an environment where they could start life in a different context.”
All I could muster as I reflected on this statement was “what type of thinking is this from a young black man. We do not have the privilege of joining the sardine like, Australian emigration run of the early 90s”.
I am now asking myself if I wasn’t too naive in my being dismissive of what my good old friend Hloni Mphuthi suggested. The reality is that authorities seem not to care about the direction the country is taking – I guess it is much better to just keep on dishing grants to keep the citizens docile.
With the ruling party heading to its Policy and later the National Conference, South Africans have been left aground, the only thing that matters now is who gets a position from the local branch up to the provincial level. Senior leaders are besotted with making it to the top positions come the national conference in December.
What makes matters worse is that with the ruling ANC at war with itself the voters are not just neglected, their state machinery – government offices and their budgets, human resources and other means that could ensure efficient delivery of services to the masses, is used for party political battles. Yes, we are not blind to the abuse of state resources in party factional battles – the police service and intelligence to mention a few. We have been here before, many a time.
Some among us have written, others have marched, while a large segment of our people have gone to burn and destroy the derelict infrastructure that they have because of the frustration of being neglected and sacrificed at the altar of political expediency. All these actions by the South African populace have amounted to nothing. The ANC and its gluttony have led to loss of hope.
Their declining number of voters, with every election, bears testimony to that. The 15 million job seekers – as reported by Statistics South Africa who have abandoned hope in looking for employment is a grim reality of the state of our being.
What’s new? You may ask. Why write all of this as we live and experience daily? Why preach to the converted? Must South Africans exit their country as proposed by my friend who was in a state of inebriation? Even if South Africans decide to abandon ship, only a tear drop can afford to.
Well, the recent events of screaming matches between ministers Bheki Cele and Pravin Gordhan with the audiences they were addressing is a plausible idea. We have been giving ear to members of the Cabinet as well as their (ruling) party to an extent that we have been zombified and turned into docile beings. We have been made to “sit down and listen” like we are children whose intellect is not fully developed.
With every appearance by a Cabinet minister being turned into a pomp self-gratification exercise that we must marvel at and applaud as if the incumbent has saved the world from extinction.
The heckling of ministers as well as the head of state should be the order of the day, especially where they’ve come to a community just as a media blitz. Just as the ANC sent a message from its offices in Lusaka back in the 1980s and encouraged that we “make the country ungovernable”, we should make the publicity stunts by Cabinet members ungovernable.
We have burned, looted and vandalised everything to an extent that we are almost without a country. Don’t get me wrong, not all dereliction of the country is our fault. Largely it is due to the ruling party, its “deployed” Cabinet and scavenging party members who, through their usage of the black, green and gold membership card, have turned our country into dystopian state.
Just as Winnie Mandela declared in the 80s that “we have no guns but boxes of matches and tyres”, we have our voices. And so, we must shout at the top of our voices and make it impossible for these incompetent and unscrupulous Cabinet ministers and their party comrades to spew rhetoric and expect us to clap and hoist them aloft as saviours. We should no longer be seen as docile voting fodder. No ways.
South Africans must reclaim their voice, we must take back our power.
No one should be given a talking to, in fact a Cabinet member – including the deputy ministers and other members who serve the ruling party in Parliament should be shouted down.
This is not a vague and unrealistic call. We should make sure that they come and listen to our needs and get the mandate from affected communities. Only then can they speak and commit themselves to act and upon their return (in a specified time frame) they can come back to face a question-and-answer session on what action have they taken. If at all they come back to spew bile, then they should be heckled off their high horses. For long we have been subjected to long speeches that throw numbers about.
We are subjected to ribbon-cutting ceremonies of “opening” this or that substandard bridge, road and such events complemented by empty promises.
We have been subjected to Cabinet members reading through reams of paper that you can clearly see they are seeing for the first time. We have been subjected to ministers who take to the podium to praise themselves. I am made to remember the Minister of Finance, Enoch Godongwana, in his maiden Budget speech boasted, “niyabona ndi-generous njani?” (Do you see how generous I am?). The nerve! The man spoke as if the money was coming out of his pocket, all to the laughter of his party colleagues. This is the mentality we need to strip off our Cabinet. Their condescending act of seeing themselves as superior beings and royalty that South Africans should praise on sight and beg when destitute should be shouted down.
We do not have an exit strategy, nor will we plan to leave. We will not abandon this country because of the ANC and their abuse and destruction of our country.
We must start now and push back, using our voices if that’s what it takes to get them to understand that we are tired of their lies, their malfeasance, their abuse of our votes and the state machinery of the Republic. In 2024 we then heckle them with our vote.
* Thamsanqa D Malinga is the Director at Mkabayi Management Consultants, a columnist, political commentator and author of “Blame Me on Apartheid” as well as “A Dream Betrayed”.