One has to admire the sangfroid of the ANC. Load-shedding oscillates between stages 3 and 6, most of Johannesburg’s western suburbs have been without water for days, everywhere traffic lights are broken and urban road surfaces are down to the gravel.
In KwaZulu-Natal, infrastructure damaged by riots and then by flooding is crumbling, the money set aside for its restoration already consumed by state-sponsored crime syndicates. Functional unemployment is above 40%, and violent crime climbs inexorably higher.
Meantime, the governing party parties on. Why are our mandarins so calm, so unfazed by the evidence of their incompetence, their mendacious rent-seeking, their intellectual incapacity?
The only possible answer lies in the success of their post 1994 gameplan: the subversion and collapse of the education system. As long as ANC voters are kept in ignorance of how the party itself has been behind state capture, as long as they believe it is the ANC and not the taxpayers who support them by way of the grant system, they will keep voting for the people who have impoverished them and the country.
There can be no other democracy where those who pay the taxes are so alienated from the process of decision-making. We should take courage from the protesters in Tehran. If we seek change we will only secure it by cutting off the supply of money that feeds the beast. It’s our money after all, and handing it over makes us complicit.
Michael Fridjhon
Parktown
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