M&G readers weigh in on President Jacob Zuma’s visits to Balfour, e-tolling, Julius Malema and more.
Don’t forget us, Zuma
Dear bab’uMsholozi, President Zuma, I’m a resident of Balfour, a town you visited twice last year following the service delivery protests in the area. I, like many residents of Dipaliseng municipality (into which Balfour falls), was deeply moved by your unannounced first visit and the subsequent visit. Not only did your visits put Balfour on the map and attract international media interest, but in you we saw a leader who was truly a “people’s person”.
We hoped that finally our pleas had been heard by the highest office in the republic. When you committed yourself (during your second visit) to addressing our long-time request to be incorporated into Gauteng province, some among us were reminded of Moses, sent by God to deliver his people. This commitment, which you made a year after the national elections and a year before local-government elections, was to us the fulfilment of your election promise that your government “will listen to the people and rule according to their will”.
Ours is not like the emotional demand of the Eastern Cape Xhosa king to secede and form a country separate from South Africa. Nor is it a nostalgic clinging to the past like those Afrikaners who demanded a volkstaat. We are only asking to be put into a province that will better deliver services to the people of Dipaleseng.
It has been months since you made that commitment, yet nothing seems to come of it. I, like many residents of Dipaleseng, watched and listened with bated breath to your speech at the opening of Parliament and hoped to hear the mention of Balfour. But, my president, you once again resigned yourself to indifference. Ruling by the people’s will continues to be mere political rhetoric, and the meeting in the Siyathemba stadium, where you made the commitment to address this issue, becomes yet another anger-management session, while police brutality, harassment and intimidation become the order of the day.
We draw courage and the willpower to fight on from Robert Sobukwe’s words: “We are reminding our people that acceptance of any indignity, any insult, any humiliation, is acceptance of inferiority. They must first think of themselves as men and women before they can demand to be treated as such.”
Our continued stay in Mpumalanga is acceptance of indignity and inferiority, caused by joblessness, homelessness, a high mortality rate and poor health facilities, and high drug abuse. Honourable Mr President, I remind you of your promise to reincorporate Dipaleseng into Gauteng. — Dumisani Zwane, pastor, and the founder of the Socialist Civic Movement, Balfour
No such thing as free road space
The government would do well to be patient and turn a deaf ear to the outrage over e-tolling. For too long we have based city transport systems on the allocation of free public-owned space to private vehicles.
Whether a commuter takes up the space of a human footprint (as in the case of walking, cycling, taxi or bus commuters) or whether they take up the (at least six times larger) space of a car, there is no charge for this valuable and limited space. The outcome is inevitable. If you give out free pizza, you expect a crowd. The government gives out free road space and we get congestion. Why shouldn’t space be charged for? We pay for all other public utilities such as water or electricity.
Public space is a precious commodity, especially during peak hours. It needs to be rationed out. To suggest that there is no alternative is an insult to the hundreds of thousands of commuters who are forced to use alternatives every day. But even if that alternative is unpalatable, the outcry could be directed more usefully at employers (to insist on flexible working hours); at colleagues and neighbours (to call for car-sharing schemes); at schools (what happened to those school buses?); and, yes, at the government, to insist on Âpublic transport and a safe and secure walk/cycle infrastructure.
But this does not quite get to the heart of the matter. The outcry is also about a way of life that we have become used to, a convenience and status that the car gives us, and that nothing else quite matches. That comfortable lifestyle is very hard to lose but the planet, the country and our children will pay the price for our continued insistence on moving through our cities in such a resource-inefficient way.
The government has to grasp the nettle on this and insist on change in the way we move. I hope for the sake of the next generation that it has the courage and wisdom to hold this course in spite of the baying for blood from the angry crowd. — Lisa Kane, honorary research associate, University of Cape Town
It’s not hate speech, it’s a historical song
By taking legal action against ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema, AfriForum is doing what colonialism and apartheid did: banning a people’s history. This time, it is not saying it is barbaric or uncivilised, it is saying it is hate speech.
The court case speaks of total disrespect for the heritage and cultural history of the African majority, whose indigenous African language is the medium of these songs. There is such a wealth of knowledge in our songs, including the song that Malema — and most of us — have sung and still sing. The ANC as government must not mince its words. It must tell AfriForum and its supporters that these songs are the archive of the people of South Africa — black and white. We cannot allow the burning of the archive.
There are just some things that democracy cannot achieve. Those whose forbears enslaved and colonised the majority for three centuries cannot dictate to us how we should write our history. The ANC celebrates its centenary year in 2012, marking the commitment of Africans to free themselves from bondage.
In Blues People: Negro Music in White America, Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) writes: “As I began to get into the history of the music, I found that it was impossible without, at the same time, getting deeper into the history of the people — The music was explaining the history as the history was explaining the music, and both were expressions of and reflections of the people!”
The song that Malema sings explains our history as the history explains our songs. Ray Phiri of S’Timela emphasises this point when he says: “Our history is locked in our songs.” The celebration of the ANC centenary year will be incomplete without the song Dubhula ebhunu. — Neo Lekgotla Ramoupi
Wife status insignificant to Nzimande story
The Mail & Guardian generally does a great and desperately needed job in highlighting nepotism in our country. However, your piece “SABC board axes Blade’s wife” (February 25) appears to be quite sexist. Nothing in it deals with Phumelele Ntombela-Nzimande’s relationship with her husband, Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande. “Blade’s wife” screams the front page, the headline on page eight and the opening paragraph of the article.
Your sidebar on page eight (“A political decision?”) is a poor attempt to justify highlighting the link between Ntombela-Nzimande and the minister. Alas, you could muster only a single sentence based entirely on an unattributed whisper: “[Some within the alliance] have claimed the reason he [the minister] was given preferential coverage [by the SABC] was because of his wife’s influence at the SABC.”
You are writing about a person who exists and acts in her own right with a public professional life, competent or otherwise. “Board axes Blade’s wife” is a clever play on words, but for a paper committed to transformation and gender justice it is not on. Ntombela-Nzimande has a long history as an activist and joined the SABC well before her husband became a minister, and I write as a veteran of battles alongside and against her. — Farid Esack, University of Johannesburg
Hypocrisy alive at UKZN
I had to read the final paragraph of Renuka Vithal’s article on the University of KwaZulu-Natal and the Council for Higher Education Audit (February 25) a few times to be quite sure that I understood it.
She writes that “it would be a pity if a process that has been collegial and self-regulated becomes bureaucratic and legalistic”. It is a piece of stunning hypocrisy. Vithal, in her previous tenure as dean of education, destroyed collegiality, undermined senior academic staff and used legal and bureaucratic means to suppress debate and destroy a climate of intellectual inquiry and debate. Self-regulation at UKZN is the product of fear.
Vithal’s approach to governance faithfully reflects that of vice-chancellor Malegapuru Makgoba more broadly in the institution. How utterly hypocritical, but so predictable, that the institution should now be demanding what it has so assiduously undermined at UKZN. — Robert ÂMorrell, Cape Town
Respect coloureds
Why does Sunday World columnist Kuli Roberts talk about coloured people as if she knows about them? She writes: “When I was young, I used to love playing with their silky hair and wished I could get rid of my kinky coarse variety.” She has the nerve to portray our fearless women as vile creatures that smoke, drink and fight.
Why was this crap, which slanders my sisters, ever published? Roberts should make it her mission really to know us, as the media has a pathetic way of printing unsubstantiated garbage so that South Africa has a distorted picture of what coloured people are really like.
I’m sure the media thinks that it respects our values, morals and dignity. Why then publish such unfounded, degrading dirt about people who had a big hand in the struggle to revolutionise South Africa? Only we have the right to poke fun at ourselves. — The Proudest of Dem All
Population out of control
A week or two ago, I was listening to Aki Anastasiou on air congratulating an Eerste Rivier woman on her 100th birthday and commending her on her nine children, 70 grandchildren, 48 great-grandchildren and 37 great-great-grandchildren — all living.
The following Monday, I was up in Beaufort West again, which has featured in the news as a drought capital. At the end of February, it was very different to the world I visited in January. Green grass is abundant, giant thunderheads build over the Nuweveld afternoon and water bursts silver from the rocky crags. Blesbok are so fat, they can hardly run.
Water shortages in the Karoo are not for want of more rain but for want of fewer human beings. The population of Beaufort West has mushroomed in the past decade. Take at look the dismal and ever-expanding shackland at De Doorns on the way back to Cape Town.
Though the need for fewer human beings is extreme, it is never mentioned. All we hear are welfare pleas: “Feed the babies, save the babies.” Noble sentiments indeed, but where is the counterpoint: “One child an adult, only one, please”?
Wouldn’t it have been great if Anastasiou had rather congratulated the Eerste Rivier woman on her 100th birthday, commending her on her foresight at only having two children, who in turn had produced only four grandchildren, and so on. One child to replace each breeding parent — or better still, one per couple.
It is time for the great plague to wake up. Global warming, excess carbon emissions, water shortages, poverty, crime, encroachment on the wilderness, deforestation — all of it is really about the Great Untalked About, namely unchecked human population growth. — Carlos Liltved, Cape Town