Parties need support of the people

I’ve always maintained that South Africans always get upset and want to rise up and fight about the nonsensical issues in a country drowning in many social ills and political chaos.

We are in state of being engulfed in arguing the non-entities when there are plenty of issues that we should take our governments, leaders, churches and even institutions to task over.

There are numerous examples but the one that springs to mind the most has to be the events of. last week

The march was seen as a white man’s march.

In actual fact, the truth is that it mostly was … then the black youth sat back and shared memes and smart comments about why the black majority didn’t support the march.

It helps nobody getting into the semantics of why we as a country have been divided on protests that affect even the smallest sector of the population.

It is true that, if the organisers of last week’s march wanted the support of the majority of the population, they should have empathised when that very same majority needed its support through service delivery protests, #FeesMustFall, taxis, last weeks strikes, etc.

Mr Richardson from the finance department is frazzled that the rand is falling. Sylvia, who works as the tea lady, is in shock because she’s amazed by this man who never thought that while he is worried about the rand falling, she never had a rand to spare that could fall.

As clichéd as it may sound, the truth is that black people have been in a constant struggle for economic emancipation.

While all the reasons may be valid as to why we did not support the strike, South Africans generally do get angry over issues which are most unlikely to change their everyday existence.

On yesterday’s National Day of Action, political parties came together with a common goal. They stopped the fragmentation, even if only for a little while.

But political parties alone cannot change the course of this runaway train. They need the support of a public that is moved enough to want better for the nation as a whole, not just for a demographic.