Open letter to the president

Lining your pockets with silk, filling your coffers, driving multiple luxury vehicles and living in Nkandlas was the modus operandi for the ANC. Not their people.

Dear Mr President, You look tired. You look browbeaten and worn. While I believe you know how to delegate tasks and make use of your ministers, it is a shame that the shepherds of your flocks are also the ones stealing the wool and eating the meat.

Minister after minister, department after department – they all find themselves embroiled in corruption charges, lack of service delivery claims, looting and the like.

Should I carry on, the list would make this letter pages long. So, you having been placed in this leadership role have no other option but to bear the brunt of it, put on a smile and attempt your best to salvage the situation. But, Mr President, may I offer you an analogy that I hope you will keep in mind when making decisions and choices in future?

We, as a human race, work under constant pressure, a juggling act if you will. And we have many balls in the air. Some of these balls are plastic, while others are glass. At times, we don’t know which is which until the ball lands and it bounces or breaks.

When handed the reins of SA, the ANC was also given all of the balls.

Plastic balls can include things such as what percentage wage increase a sector might receive, suspending a load shedding schedule and the like. Should something occur that these promises are not met as expected, there is disappointment but not devastation.

Glass balls can and have included clamping down mightily on corruption, fixing infrastructure over the greater part of SA, housing for all, quality health services for all, working sewerage for all, ensuring we will not be left in the dust in the race for the Covid-19 vaccine roll-out and promising better solutions for our rolling blackouts, to name but an infinitesimal amount of glass balls the ANC juggled. Poorly.

Tell me, Mr President, how far do you have to walk before your footsteps don’t crunch beneath you any more? How many of these glass balls has the ANC government broken to its people? How many promises were made and, clearly, not met?

You hear the cries of your people and these calls go unheard, or they are placated with a Band-Aid over a gunshot wound. The poverty line just keeps growing longer, the middle class is almost nonexistent. The pandemic has caused devastation in all sectors of our country.

Nasrec shut down at a cost of R3.5 million, vague vaccine roll-out plans which have people searching for answers elsewhere, slow roll-out resulting in our third tsunami, let alone a wave.

More glass balls. More glass shards. More devastation. More claims of corruption against the minister of health. The rich keep getting richer, while the poor keep getting poorer. Your party could have uplifted and elevated the people of this country, the poor and downtrodden, and taken them to the brighter and higher heights that they were promised.

But lining your pockets with silk, filling your coffers, driving multiple luxury vehicles and living in Nkandlas was the modus operandi for the ANC. Not their people.

Mr President, get better jugglers, who actually care for this country and have them put on the show of a lifetime, before patience runs too thin and we have a civil war on our hands.