ABSOLUTE JOY HAS TURNED TO UTTER DISGUST IN 30 YEARS – AND THE BIG TEST AWAITS IN 2024
Response to Letter from the Editor, 25 March
I like your article and I sit here with great nostalgia. I am 67 and grew up on a farm in the Dundee area in KwaZulu-Natal. Right up to matric we were poor, wearing hand-me-downs while my mother sewed the rest. She fed us from her vegetable garden; we used to plant Christmas trees in latrine buckets and sell them on the corner at the entrance of our town, which I clearly remember bought me my first pair of Grasshoppers.
Looking back on all that was spent on the ideology of apartheid and all the lives it destroyed, we must not blame everything on the Afrikaner. It was the British and other European imperialists who started the ball rolling; the Afrikaners just put legislation there to justify their ideology.
I rejoiced and sang when FW de Klerk, Pik Botha and Roelf Meyer took the bull by the horns and Nelson Mandela was released from prison. I rejoiced to cast my first vote in our democracy.
However, 30 years later, I am angry and disillusioned by what I see around me. I think it was Desmond Tutu who said what we see now is “worse than apartheid”.
Schools are not functional, inept teachers don’t arrive for work, there are pit toilets, no running water – things so easy to fix but officials help themselves to the “trough”. This is murder!
Our basic human rights have been violated; the government has disgraced our beloved country in that it cannot keep us safe.
I absolutely adore my country and our people, but I have little faith in the government and the ANC, which is going to devour itself through corruption and the murder and poisoning of its own members.
Next year will be the biggest test of our democracy because the ANC will not get even 45% of the vote. It will then form an alliance with Julius and Floyd and then we will see who are the biggest crocodiles feeding at the trough.