Villagers use simple approach for elections

THE universal access to electronic media – radio and television – makes it easy for me to continue to tap into the bottomless reserves of wisdom reposited in the intellect of my fellow villagers.

Electricity in the rural areas ensures that almost every homestead has access to not only the wireless radio but to television as well.

Like their urban counterparts, the villagers do not only have to listen to the news, but are able to see the subjects of the news themselves and thus can make a proper assessment of the veracity of what is being said.

I take joy in listening to such assessments of current events, especially the political ones.

Relatively speaking the urban residents, including those of the informal settlements, are better off than those in the countryside, in terms of the availability of social amenities.

They have access to swimming pools, children’s playgrounds with necessary equipment, sports fields, health and educational facilities with modern technological equipment, medical supplies and teaching aides. Their roads are tarred. They have piped water that flows into their houses.

Government facilities are generally within walking distance and they are thus able to easily acquire documentation at Home Affairs, application forms at Social Development and Sassa (need I write this one in full?).

The police stations are within easy reach. So are the Western courts, the labour centres and related amenities.

The urban residents have housing structures built for them by government.

The villagers see these developments and wish they also could be that convenienced.

They wish they did not have to travel to the towns to be serviced by government.

They see the irony displayed during elections whereby voting stations are located within walking distances so that the most frail can manage to go and tick the box to create government.

After election government goes and settles at its normal place – the town.

Looking at these disparities, in terms of resources allocation, in these days of instant protests, you would have thought the people who would be the most agitated and disgruntled are the villagers. Yet, the reverse is true. Too often they see urban residents blocking roads with burning tyres while complaining about electricity cuts; burning down school buildings to demand clinics; throwing thrash in the streets to demand the dismissal of certain officials in some state entity, department or municipal council.

The villagers watch in wonderment as the beneficiaries of free housing complain to elections-campaigning politicians that the houses have broken windows or cracks, which government must repair.

And they are perplexed even more when the politician concerned promises to do something about the matter.

I live in perpetual fear of the advent of the day when villagers demand the same privileges and benefits of government; a day when they will no longer feel pride in building their own homesteads, in building their own stock kraals, in tilling, planting and cultivating their own fields. Of course, the tell-tale signs are there. It is no longer surprising to hear an ablebodied young man asking how much is he going to be paid for digging a hole for a government-supplied toilet, to be used by himself and his own family; or a man asking how much is he going to be paid for hoeing the weeds from his mealie-field cultivated with government subsidy.

Surely, even in these times of economic hardship and high levels of unemployment, we should be meeting government halfway by continuing to help ourselves when we have the ability to do so.

As the leader of society the ANC carries the responsibility to nurture and conserve the values that have shaped us as an African people.

In discharging this task it must start by practising what it preaches.

Unity is strength and a divided ANC is a weak African society.

It is an unhealthy situation for the ANC to continue to splinter at every election.

In the past the splinter groups that broke away from the organisation did not have much of an impact as the world that was sympathetic to the cause of the liberation struggle was on its side.

Post-apartheid and in the era of multiparty democracy, such breakaways weaken it, surely.

The rise in racist behaviour in the ranks of the beneficiaries of colonialism and apartheid is partly a result of the ANC’s lack of coherence and inability to speak in one voice.

In spite of protestations to the contrary, come the time for national conference, the fight for leadership positions is increasingly becoming the defining feature of the movement.

Debates and discussions are becoming toxic and inconsequential as protagonists are viewed as belonging to this or the other faction, whose motives are nothing but a ploy to project their preferred candidates for president, provincial, regional or branch chairperson.

Here again my villagers have a solution so simple and honest that whenever I raise it with comrades they are stunned into momentary silence.

The villagers argue that if the ANC is the family that it has been known to be for these many decades of its existence, guided only by its constitution and well thoughtout conference resolutions, it should do what villagers do in electing community based structures such as clinic, school, roadworks committees.

In the first place candidates for committee leadership positions do not campaign to be elected; they are practically forced to stand.

When there is more than one candidate for the position of chairperson, the one who gets the biggest number of votes assumes the position, while the one with the second highest votes becomes the vice-chairperson; similarly with other positions with a deputy, the second most popular candidate becomes the deputy.

In this way everyone is happy firstly, because the most popular leads whilst the second most popular takes his second leadership position in accordance with the wishes of the community.

The winners and “losers”, if you like, are all in government, and not in opposition.

Their views, meaning those of their supporters, are all taken into account when decisions are made.

If the leaders of the ANC are sincere in their calls for an end to factionalism, the phenomenon of slates, division and gatekeeping, they should follow the route of the villagers in the selection of leaders in the run-up to and the actual elections themselves.

We have no need for victors and the vanquished in our ranks.

Too many of our leaders who choose not to form or associate with other political parties are sent into oblivion; yet we need them.

Surely, a leader who loses his bid to become president cannot be discarded into the wilderness when he clearly has better qualities than the other leaders in the leadership collective.

Nkosi Phathekile Holomisa (Ah! Dilizintaba) is deputy minister of labour and the head of the Hegebe clan