EDITOR – I read SOB's page long criticism of the eThekwini Municipality (Berea Mail Friday 16 January 2015) with interest.
Some of your concerns – your call for moribund ward committees to be dumped, objections to the vastly inflated municipal staff overtime budget and doubts over the CBP initiative – are indeed broadly relevant. Much of the rest, however, still represents tired racial and class prerogatives, sadly out of touch with most South Africans' daily grind and our rapidly changing socio-economic and environmental circumstances.
One wonders if SOB's ill-informed and intolerant attitude to the homeless, whoonga addicts, street children and sex workers would be the same if some of the subjects were white, but these issues remain topics for other debates. Of more immediate concern is that your current page long 'SOB' appears based more on your recurrent theme of “not being heard” – and, presumably obeyed – rather than the effects of decades of municipal plunder, patronage, deceit, lawlessness and the violation of the constitutional and human rights of a vast number of Durban's citizens, many of whom cannot pay rates, cannot find work, cannot support their families, cannot own a home and cannot access the basic services you daily take for granted. To put it bluntly, Mr Dunkley, if you hadn't noticed, the city is eating its own.
No one aspires to be poor and under the current, obscenely consumptive parasitic regime, most caught in the bitter poverty trap can do little to change things. Their needs, aspirations and solutions also need to be heard, considered and acted upon, but lacking the demographic loudhailer of those represented by civic organisations such as SOB, poor communities must resort to blocking roads and burning tyres to make themselves seen, although generally, still rarely heard.
They suffer far more than you from the disregard and neglect of a city council that is more interested in funding the ruling party and feathering their nests than serving the populace. And their voices are often silenced by the state's live ammunition, torture, political manipulation of what has become the criminal in-justice system, violent intimidation and active economic disempowerment.
We basically all want the same thing Mr Dunkley – decent living conditions, an income and a hand in decisions affecting our lives. Affluent communities, civic and ratepayers organisations have the economic clout to effect such change – change that is needed to benefit all Durban residents regardless of their financial position.
The solution is simple Mr Dunkley – it's all about the money. Without a free flow of funds to misuse, how long do you think the current status corrupt could be maintained? When other municipalities have become dysfunctional, residents have successfully bypassed the system, elected their own representatives and paid their rates into trust accounts – effectively governing themselves. So quit 'SOBbing' Mr Dunkley, put your money where your mouth is and withhold yours.
When a fruit is rotten at the core, no amount of washing will remove the taint of decay from its flesh and it must be discarded.
Similarly, to focus only, as your organisation seems to, on superficial, often brutal, 'cleaner city' campaigns and the protection of elite minority interests without addressing the root causes of the social ills that SOB so loudly condemns, will prove – as you may only belatedly be discovering – to be utterly futile, if we do not also excise the rot within the heart of local, provincial and national government. Simultaneously we need to take a long hard look at our societal and personal failures – our selfishness, arrogance, ignorance, prejudice, cowardice and greed – which have permitted the current unsustainable and untenable situation to develop.
With something so obviously rotten as our outdated, inequitable system of governance, the predatory socioeconomic hegemony it perpetuates, and what has become our astounding obsession with self – new ideas, attitudes and solutions are urgently needed.
Petulant 'SOBbing', Mr Dunkley, merely serves to entrench racial, economic and social divisions, exacerbate existing tensions and offers little hope of reaching common solutions to the overwhelming inequality, poverty and greed that threatens to destroy our shared existence.
Vanessa Burger
Umbilo
