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What's the issue?

What's the issue?

Author: Tomas Yoko
Date: 2013-04-18
Hey Boss, when the honourable Bishop Desmond Tutu dances around in his purple skirt and cackles like a drunken hyena, telling you how you are missing your mark and, to quote his eminence, "worse than the apartheid regime", well you can just laugh him off as some old eccentric guy slowly going senile.

But when Trevor Manuel stands up and starts calmly telling you that you are missing your mark, you really should sit up and take notice. When Trev speaks, you can be sure there is some very well calculated mathematical structure to his message. Uncle Trev does not need to grab for power, although he really should have, I think he would make a fantastic president. When Trev starts saying things like "The public loses trust in government when it reads reports that we spend billions on contracts to politically-connected people who deliver poor quality services. Let us be hard on ourselves, whatever else this practice may masquerade as, it is not empowerment, it is theft. The lack of rigour and the absence of disincentives, or to use a term that we have more frequently in the recent past, "consequences", bedevils the best laid policies. There is the fundamental problem that we cannot begin to transform South Africa to the kind of country with the type of opportunities foreseen by the drafters of our still-young Constitution."

Well Boss, then you really should push those glasses closer to those eyeballs and take notes. When Uncle Trev says you, the government, can no longer hide behind apartheid, then there must be some substance in the message. If you wont hear it form him, then I'm afraid, and really afraid, that you wont hear it from anybody.

Well there is merit in not listening to your detractors, but now a survey commissioned by the ANC adds fuel to the fires of discontent showing that even the common and garden variety of ANC supporter is growing tired of the way some of the people in power are treating their positions.

It still being a long way, in some repsects, to the National Elections in 2014, rthere might be enough time to heed the warning signs but it does not seem to be going in that direction.

Just recently the shocking resignation of Judicial Service Commission member Izak Smuts seems to be ringing the bells of a mega wake up call, that will probably just be switched off and we will all go back to sleep. In comments on his resignation the tone of frustration is so apparent when he said, "It has become increasingly apparent to me, and has been made devastatingly clear during the proceedings of the commission this past week, that my understanding of the constitutional values, the constitutional role and duty of the commission, and even of the basic rights such as those of human dignity and freedom of speech, is so far removed from the understanding of the majority of the commission that it is not possible for me to play an effective role on the commission. The time has come for someone else to try and succeed where I have spectacularly failed."

Take that.