Address land reform issue
THE headline in the Daily News, on June 8, “12 weeks in fear of invasions”, refers. This is certainly a frightening reality. Today it’s Chatsworth, tomorrow its Mhlanga and the next it is Durban North.
This is extremely alarming and has the ability to affect all other areas.
The municipality needs to take full responsibility and secure all its properties.
It is time that the government addressed land reform and provided housing for the poor.
These land invasions are the frustration of people who do not have proper housing coming to the fore.
The national and local governments should work together to produce solutions that balance protecting the interests of the public with addressing the needs of the poor. DHAYALAN MOODLEY
Mobeni Heights DEMOCRACY professes to be a sugar-coated pill, a panacea for all social ills, but in practice is truly a far cry from any of that.
The wide spectrum of injustices present within the dictatorship of democracy range from aspects as sad as the high price of a loaf of bread to the exorbitant cost of basic, private health care, interspersed with mid-frequencies of other highly-exploited, non-luxury needs, like airtime data for cellphones.
For instance, back-chatter “Camel” ( Daily News, June 7), complains about involuntarily receiving data continuously that eats into his airtime, impoverishing and reducing his utility phone to zero usefulness.
There are thousands of other areas like this that marginalise lower income groups.
Democracy does not permit authorities to step in and interfere: private bus and taxi fares can’t be fixed.
Rent- control, ironically introduced during colonial times, has been flung over the balcony.
Returning to victims like Camel, what seems to break his hump is the ridiculous greedy mechanism that permits IT giants like Facebook to manipulate its WhatsApp to be restricted to only expensive smartphones, which automatically cuts off billions of poor users who can only afford the cheaper keyboard-type “stupid” phones.
Again, most ironically, it is this poverty-forever-des- tined people who need this affordable service far more for basic communication than middle-class humans who can afford touch-screens and use WhatsApp most times for casual chatter.
Even in bigger countries like India and the US, the people most marginalised by totally “free”, uncontrolled technology and the absence of legislated maximum retail prices are the poor majority.
So, democracy is a wonderful dream for wealthy capitalists, but merely a far-fetched, unattainable, vote-catching, unsafe, uncaring mirage for the man in the street.
And the bigger the democracy, the greater this sad aberration. ES ESSA Durban