Politics is getting worse
It is a dark irony to suggest that politics is inherently about the abuse of power and is usually a milieu where arrogant, obnoxious and self-serving, corrupt barely illiterate but illusive people thrive and climb to authority.
After 20 years in active politics I recognize that some people who engage in politics are unable or averse to seek work elsewhere. This is true as some politicians are unqualified to do anything besides deceive others.
Study the education of our Ministers down to our Mayors and Councillors and ask: Can people with limited education and hold office where billions and a nations future is involved? Some will argue, but we employ officials to do the technical work? Question, does a uneducated person have the ability to identify aptitude?
According to Auditor-General (A-G) Kimi Makwetu, only 18 municipalities out of 257 obtained clean audits for the previous financial year. One municipality out of KwaZulu-Natal’s 54 managed to achieve a clean audit. The audit outcomes suggest that inability, wholesale stupidly and an outright lack of skills has given rise to such a level of wasteful and fruitless expenditure that our shared future as a nation is threatened.
Example, a rep from the A-G’s office told a meeting that I attended, that millions was lost when hospital equipment stored in an open veld rusted away as the hospital was incomplete. There are many examples of this type of stupidity across our nation especially in the Eastern Cape and Limpopo etc.
The problem is that, when service delivery suffers, folk riot and burn the local school, library or bus/taxi rank. When problems deteriorate, folk migrate to the Western Cape or Gauteng and become a burden on limited resources in these two provinces. Ironically, since the budgets remains in the wasteful municipalities, the rot from where they moved is unsolved as the same politician and officials deviously tend to remain in authority.
Since I have met folk with university degrees that cannot change a car tire, I am not proposing that a degree will solve all our problems. However, we have to start somewhere regarding the governance of South Africa.
Cllr Yagyah Adams
Cape Muslim Congress