Agang’s campaign in the Eastern Cape occupies two worlds. We
talk to the forgotten people, the communities where nothing works, there are no
jobs and no way out. They want to be heard and they want a reason for hope. Then we enter the world of political debates, where
everything is about point-scoring, who shouts the loudest and political
posturing.
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| The PE debate (Source: Herald) |
Tuesday 8 April: I am speaking for Agang in a debate in Port
Elizabeth with 7 other parties, and the other opposition parties find a way to
work Nkandla into every other sentence, sending the ANC part of the crowd into
a frenzy each time.
Sorry, I am too much an academic to play this sort of game.
We discovered the ANC’s on switch. Now talk about everything else, the
humiliation and pain our people experience every day, and what we are going to
do about it. How we can restore pride, rebuild hope and rekindle the promise of
our new democracy of 20 years ago? But the ANC are the ones to watch. Nkandla
is their issue, and you have to wonder how they can go into an election with
such a liability.
So what is the ANC speaker’s response to all this? He
totally ignores all reference to Nkandla and goes on about his party’s track
record.
What track record? I wonder, having just been to a place
called Taliban in the vicinity of Uitenhage. This is one of the most depressing
places I’ve ever seen, with people living in utter hopelessness amidst heaps of
trash. I talk to young people who passed matric and have no jobs. They are
angry and feel betrayed.
Then the light comes on. This is the ANC game plan. Let the
opposition shout Nkandla at the top of their voices, and calmly prattle on
about all the good the ANC is doing. The message: Nkandla was a cock-up but
otherwise we are doing just fine.
Well, are they?
Last financial year the government by their own figures lost
R33-billion to wasteful spending and corruption. That’s one Nkandla every three days.
Nkandla is not an
anomaly. It’s the way the government regularly does business.
And that’s just the money they admit to wasting – no doubt
totally leaving out the waste of a bloated bureaucracy in the Eastern Cape
Health Department that leaves insufficient funds for medical staff, to quote
one example.
It is wastage on this scale that makes all our problems seem
so hard. Yes, equalizing education post-apartheid was always going to be a
challenge. The same for delivering quality health care to the poor and fixing
economic inequality. We are not going to solve any of these problems by
throwing money down the toilet on a vast scale (in parts of the country that
have toilets).
In this weird inside-out looking-glass world, a government
that flushes money away more efficiently than it delivers clean water has found
a way to turn what should be a massive liability into an electoral advantage. A
way of personifying corruption and incompetence in the president, while somehow
carrying off the fiction that his personality has nothing to do with the
government he heads.
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| Agang visits Glenmore |
I think about the people in Glenmore, a dry dusty apartheid
forced removal dumping ground also here in the Eastern Cape. No jobs, no hope,
nothing to look forward to but the next social grant day.
Would people living in a trash heap be happy that the
government has turned Nkandla into an electoral strategy to evade the issues
that blight their lives?
Here’s a challenge for the ANC. Maybe you should go and ask
them. Try Taliban and Glenmore to see if you get the same answer.
But first, disguise yourself as a human being. I’ll lend you
my Agang T-shirt.
But of course the ANC will not take up this challenge,
because Nkandla is their strategy to win. By talking loudly about this one
thing, opposition parties turn the voters’ attention away from the other 120-times
Nkandla-scale misspending that happens every year. We implicitly accept the
ANC line that everything else is fine by making this one big failure the only
one we shout about.
The personality of the president is not incidental to the
ANC. It embodies what the ANC stands for now: a party of greed and
self-enrichment.
Every person in Glenmore, Taliban and countless other
townships and settlements who live lives of hopelessness and despair deserve
better. It is Agang’s mission to change this country for the better, and that
will not happen if we let the ANC get away with this. At very least, we should
force them to defend their entire track record, not just disgracefully profligate
expenditure on a financially incontinent president’s house.
The sad thing is that the money gone on waste and corruption
could go a long way towards the social programmes we need to turn this country
around. We do not need crazy economic policies or empty promises. What we need
is sound governance and active citizens who stand up for themselves – a
rekindling of the promise of freedom that burnt so bright in 1994.
