When Frederick W Robertson said, "There are three things
in the world that deserve no mercy - hypocrisy, fraud, and tyranny", he
could have been talking about our current crop of politicians.
Hypocrisy
Julius Malema insisting that Jacob Zuma "pays back the
money" is hypocrisy of the first order - how about your R20m in
outstanding income tax Mr Malema? Helen Zille’s hand wringing over budget cuts
that will mean freezing more operational posts, while saying nothing about the
Municipal Demarcation Board creating even more political seats in local
councils, is also highly hypocritical. Nothing more needs to be said about the jaw-dropping
hypocrisy of the ANC that hasn’t already been said.
Fraud
In among all the known areas of blatant corruption, our local
government electoral system is itself a pernicious fraud of the first order.
All proportional councillors in local government, and the parties who appoint
them, are defrauding the public of money that should rather be spent on service
delivery. The Municipal Structures Act,
and the Municipal Demarcation Act remove the need for proportional
representation. This is borne out by the 2011 electoral results, where proportional
councillors could influence the balance of power in only 14 of the 234 local
and metro councils. For the rest, DA and
ANC councillors vote as instructed by the party leadership, and the “also-ran”
parties are just ignored. Proportional representation is an expensive political
irrelevancy, costing in the region of R7.5 billion for the 5 years from 2011,
which is likely to increase to around R9 billion for the next 5 year term.
Tyranny
Political party leaders are guilty of tyranny as they hold
all the cards when it comes to who gets what job at all three levels of
government, with an ultimatum to toe the party (my) line or get kicked out. The
EFF have also taken tyranny to a new level with their unsubtle intimidation of
anyone who disagrees with them, as underlined by their veiled threat to certain
journalists at a recent press conference.
No Mercy
Civil society holds the key, and we must show the present
political cabal no mercy. We must start to believe in ourselves and stop
listening to all the politically populist babble, and their even baser ploy of throwing
pooh at each other in the hope that some of it will stick. We need to stand up to politicians of all
parties and say we have had enough of your divisive policies and behaviour. We
must also tell them in no uncertain terms that we are no longer going to pay
for unnecessary sycophants, and other party faithful cadres, that they
parachute into municipalities through the irrelevant proportional
representation system.
To break the stranglehold that politicians have over us and
our local governments, we need to change the dual candidacy proportional
representation party list system to a single candidacy constituency based
system. While political resistance to
this is guaranteed, we must believe that we can force them to change this insidious
system, and not just shrug it off as an impossibility – as Madiba said “It is
always impossible until it is done”.
Time is short, but #PRMUSTFALL before we are saddled with another 5
years of this unnecessary political expense.
