What have the children done?

This past Monday a Facebook friend, Litye Mathiso wrote, ”On the 20^th July 2014 a sad day I was hijacked my car, cellphones taken away. Now I know how it feels to be a victim of crime. Good evening.”

It is sad. It is a pitiful, painful and sad reality of our society. We wake up each day in anticipation of the next bad sad story. Mostly, whilst we wait we then become the subject of the story, like my FB friend.

What member of society hunches up in a corner contemplating a sexual assault on a three month old baby? What kind of a person ‘scouts’ a hit on the home of a hard-working man, watches his family for days on end, revises his plans a thousand times, attacks and in the process finds a gleeful moment in raping a mother in the presence of her children and their dying father?

What ear deafens to the wail of a boy as they hang onto their four-year-old almost life, but gets excited to the wild screeches of the tyre and the manoeuvres of the steering wheel?

We are a society that has long gone past needing to be prayed for, Mfundisi. No. God does not wear All Stars, he does go across a highway when a thousand vehicles approach at a 120km/h. God does not remember us. In fact, who is that?

We are a society that requires no science to understand, Criminologist and Psychologist. No. We do not any full-scale enquiry. We do not need leadership, we’ve squandered it, ate Mandela whilst he was alive, spit on his dream and now we piss on his grave. Not us!! No no no.

We are a society that has stopped dreaming, afraid to fly and eat and drink and eat and drink. That is us. We eat our children, black and white. That is us. If something is not brutal, it does not define us. We are scum, we have no pity, and just do not talk to us about conscience!!

We live in envy, of nations, of neighbours, of relations, of siblings, of spouses, of our children. It would be better if we did nothing.

In the end, we need to ask what have the children done to deserve us.

You've arrived

June 2, 2014 at 6:55pm

PublicFriendsOnly MeCustomFamilyKagiso Senior Secondary SchoolSee all lists...Mogale AreaGo Back

Story goes you ran bare feet to the corner store. For paraffin and Lion matches. Met the sleek along the way. Scratched their backs with Mama’s change and saved yourself a slap on the head. Got home and sold Mama a tall tale about the neighbour’s dog that chased you down the road and made you lose all the cents in your hands.

Now you don’t need those, you lean against the wall and up bright becomes the room. You touch a switch and the stove goes hot, then another you will have your music.

You’ve arrived.

In the informal settlement they run bare feet to the corner store. For paraffin and Lion matches. They meet the sleek along the way. Scratch their backs with Mama’s change and save themselves a slap on the head. Get home and sell Mama a tall tale about the neighbour’s dog that chases them down the road and makes them lose all the cents in their hands.

When they lean against the wall it threatens to fall. It takes a lifetime to get the stove hot and most times waiting is their only music.

You’ve arrived.

You covered your head with plastic bags on rainy days. Stepped into poodles with dog poo on your way home. You fetched wood from the forest. You sat in circles around the fire for Grandpa’s stories.

Now you don’t do those. Car has a rain sensor and smells dog poo miles away. There’s a choice of a heater or a fireplace. And the heat can also come from under the floor. Channels have many stories.

You’ve arrived.

In the informal settlement they cover their heads with plastic bags on rainy days. Step into poodles with dog poo on their way home. They fetch wood from the forest. It takes a lifetime to get the fire burning and most times waiting is their only story.

You’ve arrived.

You took turns to lay the blankets on the floor. The biggest bed on the planet. Rested a sister, brother, cousin, friend and the visitor who lost their way. Under the kitchen table. But uncle got to use the sofa. Fought in the morning to be first to wash. This cake of soap washed all up but the visitor cleans up first, eats first even when it’s the last slice of the bread that Papa brought home.

Now you don’t need those, everyone has a room. There’s a single, double, queen and king size bed. There’s another room built for the temper, it’s the fed-up room used when Papa and Mama fight over the leftovers that no one wants to eat.

You’ve arrived.

In the informal settlement they take turns to lay the blankets on the floor. The biggest bed on the planet. It rests a sister, brother, cousin, friend and any visitor who loses their way. Under the kitchen table, even with uncle. They fight in the morning to be first to wash. Their cake of soap must wash all up but the visitor cleans up first, eats first even when it’s the last slice of the leftovers that Papa brought home.

You’ve arrived.

Help another to find their way. It is the wise who say a candle loses nothing when it lights another candle, but darkness loses a great part of itself.

You arrive when everyone arrives!!

Nelson Mandela: an inspiration

May 30, 2014 at 11:32am

PublicFriendsOnly MeCustomFamilyKagiso Senior Secondary SchoolSee all lists...Mogale AreaGo Back

I am of African descent, a child of the mocking sun, the grass that shreds the ego, the doleful moon that sends arrogance to pasture, the river that put paid to the individual long before the wind could sing or the sweat could touch the ground. I am a descendant of Phalo, from the barren lands of Mqanduli, of Amanqabe and my father pouted a bellyful from that petite beauty of Amangqosini of Cofimvamba. I am a public servant, a slave to love, yes love for my people.

When I see the cracked heels of that laughing little girl whose nose leaks as she adjusts that four-times big school-shirt which last met a detergent when it was first discovered, I stop to think…I man of the people, do I work hard enough? Would Mandela approve? When the phone rings decibels higher than the hungry urchin growing in that shack that threatens in a wink to fall, pick up to be told that the sewer is running, my streetlights don’t shine anymore-they might come for me in the dead of night, my road is crooked-it don’t come to my house, my tar road has washed away, I stop to think…I man of the people, do I work hard enough for the little child who is not fine or the big man who has a line? Would Mandela approve?

Fortune has met many of us and threw some lot our way and now what was once the dusty streets I walked and frolicked in – up to no mischief and for relief, I drive down and then I see them. The hungry eyes of the dreamers, lining up the avenues and crescents, waiting and waiting, patiently crying with a smile for the yield of the day…this freedom! Angry at dawn, they are…not a lawn do they prefer. The sick and tired who’ve gotten tired of being sick and tired. They wait for it and it’s only a three letter word…job. I cry too in my heart, I greet and they don’t return favours like that…I know. They are my kind, my friends, my sisters, my brothers and they only want it –even if it is a piece of it. A piece job, they call it. I see the big-hearted hustlers too, busy with business that’s never busy. When the traffic light turns red, I stop to think…I man of the people, do I work hard enough for the men and women who have lost their dignity because they cannot put just a slice of bread on the table? Would Mandela approve? Everyday I wake up to think, what should I not do to slight him that made it all possible. I work to make Mandela approve!! He is my inspiration and I hope he becomes yours too. He is on God’s side at this hour, and my Mama taught me that you are never wrong on that side!!

http://www.thenewage.co.za/Detail.aspx?news_id=11441&cat_id=1007&utm_source=thenewage&utm_medium=facebook

http://www.thenewage.co.za/Detail.aspx?news_id=11441&cat_id=1007&utm_source=thenewage&utm_medium=facebook

Africa's Leaders Must Respect Masses

African leaders, and politicians generally, probably have a high estimate of themselves. It is unconscionable that the masses of this huge continent can think about their future without factoring them into the scheme? It never occurs to most that this is actually what happens when children dream before politics tampers with their lives. In our innocence, we hope for life as doctors, lawyers, big houses, nice cars and cushy jobs and nowhere does a politician come into the equation when we build these castles? It is that independence of mind that so often gets displayed when we go to the polls. We think and make choices we want, never mind the bombardment of political messages that precede our trips to voting stations. It becomes extremely mind-boggling if a person thinks that they make more sense than all of us when we choose not to elect them to lead us. When one says that I dispute results of polls, they are actually saying that the dispute is between millions of minds versus his or her brain? When you say that then you betray your vanity, your overgrown sense of self-importance and you unconsciously force those who you would have persuaded in future to despise you. You squander goodwill. That is not political and tactless. This is the reason that revolutionaries will always stay head above shoulders compared to politicians.   

Xenophobia test for South Africa

Are we a nation? Is that the question?
Nkosana Zali

More than 3 million people from around the world sat at seats in different stadia around our country as we hosted the 2010 FIFA World Cup ™. The uncertainties, doubts and distrusts over our ability to deliver this world showpiece had fallen by the wayside. Throughout the history of the World Cup, only the USA and Germany managed to draw that number of people to the stadia as South Africa did. What a remarkable feat!

We also take into account that three billion people watched the final throughout the world. That is an enviable international marketing opportunity for our country.

There are also the big soft gains of a rally around the national flag reminiscent of the 1994 ushering in of democracy; the vuvuzelas behind Ghana that gave many goose bumps and so on. Every South African, black and white, joined the entire continent when it had its “I am an African” moment. Diego Forlan... Oh, Diego Forlan.

During this euphoria, many who believe that science has steeled them, went about studying and analysing this nation that was so preoccupied with welcoming international guests. These scholars then warned that this world spectacle was soon to prove to be our nemesis; suggesting that we were somehow capable of putting up a grin for the Iberians, all the Koreas, even the Australians who wanted to take our shine away a few years ago. We would be unable however to embrace our own African brothers and sisters after the party.

We laughed it off as just another ploy to rubbish the country. It was inadequate that this ‘incapable’ republic had completed stadia a year before the World Cup. We had new roads and the scramble for tickets made some feel a third world war was imminent. Everyone wanted to come to this land. Then a racist bigot dies a humiliating death and the doomsayers continued to bash the country. Yet the hotels and B & Bs received thousands of enquiries – none of them with special security requests like machete-proof vests or armoured taxis. Travel agencies and the airports struggled to meet the demand for flights and accommodation. Suddenly, this train seemed unstoppable. To rub salt into this wound, the Gautrain was launched.

But this nascent democracy has many areas of vulnerability. The fragile nature of its race relations and the grinding poverty that the majority live under remain the main source of focus for the ruling party. It is these issues that can be manipulated for shallow ends.

The issues raised here are not about our capability to host the world. It is a question of wanting to portray Africa as a failed continent, and South Africa as lacking nationhood. It is assumed that by even giving us a chance to host the world’s most prestigious competition, the spots will stay the same. Africans will devour each other forever.

There should be no programme that Africa will rally around and from which launch an offensive against the poverty that marauds her. Those who peddled this actually know that the curtain never falls for any country that hosts the World Cup. The matches and ceremonies may come and go, but the curtain never falls.

South Africa must resist xenophobia. We might have been the first hosts to bomb out during the group phase of the World Cup, but we cannot be the only hosts who never leveraged the goodwill that comes with the World Cup. Our ticket remains valid so we must soar for our country, our continent and the world that knows now we all are one!

Thought Leader's Unilateral Declaration of Amnesia

ONE CARELESS MOVE LOSES THE WHOLE GAME
Nkosana Zali

A rejoinder to “SA cannot afford a failing presidency at this time,” by Mike Trapido (Thought Leader, 31 May 2008)

The USA I know is led by George W. Bush, whose replacement we await in the November 2008 Election. Bush is serving a second term, into which he was voted by a majority thanks to an uninspiring Democrat campaign and a rejuvenated patriotism amongst a nation that was once screaming for his blood as he marched their heavily-armed sons and daughters onto the Iraqi soil, bombed it, maimed and killed countless Saddam Hussein loyalists as well as innocent civilians. The search for weapons of mass destruction would, like it had been reported before by UN bodies, prove to have been a hoax to rally the American people around a war whose mission they did not know. He defied the world and told her, short of speaking from a black stallion, that, “It’s either you are with us or against us.” Unlike the Oscar winning movies of their Hollywood, the American people could not see that the script was badly written (much like this rejoinder). They bit the bullet and hung on in there as GW Bush stuck like glue in the oval office. His troop could not stay the cause; Chirac, Blair, Howard etc. To think that he is uncomfortable now is to defy logic. He had already defied world logic, and the American logic continued to confuse because he survives to his last day in office. When it comes to Bush, what is has always been. In America what is has always been. They had done it before, impeaching their beloved Clinton but let him stay at the oval office. March their presidents out!?

Gordon Brown just came to peck as his predecessor had left him with six of a seven-roomed house on fire. He would not survive the public disdain that his countrymen had stored for the Labour Party for ganging up with Bush to fight a war that none could prove was for the reasons it was fought for. There were investigators of ‘this war thing’ that died or were suspected of having committed suicide? The British would not, like it is always said of them, stiffen the upper lip on this one. Labour was going to be punished one way or the other. Brown had signed the checks that bankrolled the troops and they even arranged a war adventure for their prince in one of these places of occupation (we thought colonialism is dead). John Major and his party had no ‘charm’ to woo the British with, giving Labour their strongest ever presence in decades. Major had been driven under by the overpowering shadow of his predecessor, Margaret Thatcher, whose economistic politics had come back to haunt the British years after she left office. Labour rose on the strength of their social democratic (some say, left-leaning) policies which appealed to a Britain reeling from Thatcherism whilst Major’s demise was on the back of policies that they had not conceived but had championed. The Iron Lady had done two parties in whilst in office and long after she had left it. Labour found Britain ungovernable, not in riotous terms but Thatcherism is now a world institution and governments of rich states are intuitively willed by it. (Her son now plays the puppet master on the African soil) For Gordon, things are just brown and soon nothing will ever convince the people of Britain that there will be green pastures for them in his Labour. It’s not Brown’s fault …it has always been just a fault!

My own position is that the premise of any argument, like those who fought struggles before us taught us and had observed of war, is that an understanding of a whole facilitates handling of a part because a part is subordinate to the whole. As in chess and so in war – today’s war against poverty, disease, landlessness and ignorance. And what counts above everything else more than the sentiment is the actual liquidation of these elements. The stripes are earned for fighting, not for seeing the necessity of, the war against poverty. The discomfort of leaders of Britain and the USA cannot be transplanted willy-nilly onto the South African situation. Secondly, the ANC government is, despite all odds, not failing- especially the presidency. Let me posit!

Food and petrol prices are, as economists say, influenced by exogenous factors. Rich nations subsidize their agricultural sector and tilt the market in their favour. No matter how hard-working any farmers in the developing world are, they stand no chance against their counterparts in the developed world. Demand is beginning to eat into supply, and (like the merchants they are) the richer nations tweak the prices higher to benefit from the squeeze they had built up for many moons ago. On the other hand, oil producers wash their hands of rising prices and blame the markets for the hikes. The world is not a fair place for the poor. The ANC government has arrayed a range of forces; Brazil-SA-India, Latin America and Africa, Africa and Asia-Pacific Nations to fight this world trade system that benefits only the rich.

The ANC government represents us in an SADC that is involved in delicate and strenuous but strategic talks that will reduce and remove uneven economic development and all barriers to trade between neighbours within the region and ensure free movement of people, goods and services; whilst engaged in a long-term mission to effect greater and fair trade between and amongst African countries.

What are the challenges? A poor continent, an unstable and degenerating Zimbabwe, a restive South African population that awaits good hospitals, houses, schools and jobs. There is no convenient moment, because poverty cannot oblige; it is neither magnanimous nor judicious. What are the choices? To defect or stay the cause. Run to Australia and point fingers at that pariah that you left behind across the Indian Ocean, profit from it and gain new friends or get actively involved in building a caring society whilst criticizing it where it (you and society) goes wrong. It requires that we dispose of the notion that when we swear across the fence, the neighbour will die of the noise we make. We need to embrace and deploy the enduring abilities South Africans displayed at Tuynhuys, Kempton Park and all the venues where we – the once violently polarized- negotiated a truce which we now seek to break at the sign of umvumbi – the soft rains! We cry that a storm is coming when the state of affairs is otherwise.

In Ireland, the ANC government played a noble role in mediating agreements, almost similar to Kempton Park, within an Irish family that was threatening to bomb itself out of existence. In the DRC, Burundi and everywhere this ANC government was called to share (not remake) its experiences. We cannot remember that even when the DRC went for its election the patchwork that was the resolution of its political stalemate, had continued with a very belligerent force fighting in the east (but it sought a truce when the national tide and world opinion had turned against war)? What we see in Zimbabwe is a ruling party that has been complacent over its country’s political, social and economic situation and then got rudely rattled and awakened by an opposition party whose leader is best known for his sophistry more than what practical survival package he has for his country. If everything and everybody is told as it is or they are, then Morgan Tsvangirai has not been convincing about what rescue package he has for Zimbabwe except the removal of Robert Mugabe. Politics first, then all else will follow? But that does not mean the people of Zimbabwe cannot remove Mugabe and replace him with somebody they want, even if he has no plan. The choice will have been made by them.

Thabo Mbeki is not going to make of Zimbabwe what he pleases or of Mugabe what he is not. Any mediation he is charged with does not extend his rule over to the borders of the DRC, Botswana, Zambia, Mozambique and so on. It would be an international relations disaster if he was expected to rule Zimbabwe by world opinion’s decree or proxy. To install Tsvangirai because the USA says he won would stretch it and even precipitate worse onslaughts against good Zimbabweans by Mugabe’s people. The choice, though unpalatable, is to wait (Tsvangirai’s missives to Mbeki notwithstanding). The first round of elections has proven that ZANU-PF is not invincible, after all. It is in a presidential run-off, anyway!

The proposition that the ANC government will release resources to tend to the needs of the masses after the Zimbabweans have left begs the question: Are we saying that government has stopped all its programmes to attend to the daily needs of Zimbabwean exiles? When this government (irony of ironies) hosted the 2001 UN Conference on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, a speaker took a similar line of argument and subsequently had to explain what it was that they meant to say and less about what they actually did say. As a lawyer, Mr Trapido would agree that there is an undercurrent in this reasoning. Xenophobia rests on the devouring, yet often unfounded, fear that a non-resident uses up state resources when a national is in desperate need. You might just as well accuse ‘the exiles’ of pick-pocketing!

Who are the dictators of the SADC? Where are they? Lesotho, Botswana, South Africa, Swaziland, Mozambique, Zambia …? Give you Swaziland (and Zimbabwe if you like) but beyond that? Are we again saying more than what we just mention yet again?

I love the magical lyrics that conclude your input. It is almost guaranteed that the resolution of the Zimbabwean problem is a resolution of the South African problem. It is the right approach and it is (on a grand scale) where institutions of the PAP are directing Africa. But do you have to put a sock in it and support a resolution for Zimbabwe, and doubt successors to Mugabe before they take office. Cronyism, nepotism, self-interested dictators, and such things? It is either one is in it or is not. Despite his flaws, Mbeki is in it! He does not have one leg out of the heat, ready to jump. When we label African leaders in ways that our colonizers spoke, then it means that we have not moved. We call for progress half-heartedly. Which begs the last two questions: Why bother about change in Africa when you have concluded the worst about her leaders? Why praise that which cannot be praised (including heroic ANC leaders)?

People may have problems with the present government and our ruling party, the ANC. The ANC has a leader, Jacob Zuma, president of the ANC and working outside government and Thabo Mbeki (ex-officio NEC member of the ANC) doing business in government. If there was a crisis of leadership, the recent Polokwane Conference squashed it and placed whoever wherever. All of these other things will pass!! I am allowed to wave my magic wand, too?