Philippi mass murder not less newsworthy than Vegas shooting

IT IS with great sadness that I read about another innocent person who lost their life on the Cape Flats, this time 67-year-old Lesley Idas of Manenberg.

And I believe it is important that we call these victims by their names as it has become such a common occurrence it is easy that the life of Idas can be forgotten as a statistic.

Before Idas’s murder, I was shocked at the report of 11 innocent people who lost their lives in the mass murder in the Marikana Informal settlement in Philippi.

How is it that there was not a national or even an international outcry about this? Why is it that so little attention is given to the mass murder of black people, especially in the Western Cape?

Our news is dominated at the moment with the mass shooting in Las Vegas and the loss of 59 American lives. Yet here in Cape Town and in South Africa, the almost daily mass killings of innocent people is given a brief mention and then forgotten.

I cannot understand how 11 people, innocent human beings, can be gunned down in a mass shooting, not unlike the one in Las Vegas, and it does not make international headlines.

Can you imagine if it were 11 white people who lost their lives? Or if it was a white person who was shot in Manenberg in the crossfire of the ongoing gang war?

How is that that three white people get hacked to death in Stellenbosch and it was in the news consistently for months, yet people get shot and hacked to death daily on the Cape Flats and it hardly gets a mention?

Why is it that even now the newspapers have not given us a list of names of the 11 people who died in the mass shooting?

Why is it that these human beings are another statistic?

Why is it that white lives still matter more than that of black lives?

We, as a people, should be ashamed, the Western Cape government should be ashamed and the national government should be ashamed.

One life lost is one life too many, and any government which sits idly by while their citizens are dying at such a prolific rate should resign and does not deserve to be in power as it does not have the best interest of their people at heart.

This is not an indictment on national government, but more so on the elected officials of those wards and the province.

What are the ward councillors of Manenberg, Hanover Park, Nyanga and the various Wards in Mitchells Plain, Khayelitsha, etc doing? What is the Western Cape local and provincial government doing to stem the tide of the daily murders of our people?

The definition of a pogrom is the organised massacre of a particular ethnic group, and while there is nothing that is done to stem the tide, one can only believe that it is publicly sanctioned by the powers-that-be and there is no other way to describe the continued mass murder of black people on the Cape Flats. Michael Petersen Stellenbosch (Originally from Hanover Park)