I’m a concerned citizen from Reiger Park.
At just 22 years of age, I’ve seen a lot happening in Reiger Park and I’m concerned for this community.
It seems that everyone only knows this community for all the negative aspects of it and what they heard about it (violence, murders, drugs) but none seem to care about the faith of this community and its people.
We have been trying for years to get real help for the youth who struggle with drugs.
They struggle to make sense out of life because the unemployment rate is high among the youth of Reiger Park.
With every election year, political parties campaign in our community, wanting our votes and promising us the world and that change will come.
Yet, as soon as the elections are over, we are back where we started with no employment, more drugs on the streets, fewer young people going to school and more lives lost due to gang violence.
Our community’s infrastructure (roads, schools, houses, parks) are depleted.
Our roads look like something from a horror movie with potholes everywhere. When the council ‘fixes’ the potholes all they do is to fill up the holes.
When the rains fall, the material they used to poorly fill the hole ends up down the drain. We are then again stuck with potholes. This is typical of the shoddy work of our metro.
We have pensioners (our old people whom the government had sworn to look after) who struggle with leaking water meters and blocked drains, and when phoning the council they promise to send someone right away to assess the situation.
But again, this is but an empty promise. It takes weeks, even months, to get any real help from local government.
Yet we as a country complain about a water crisis in South Africa but we have to beg the government just to do a proper maintenance check on the infrastructure.
And how about the constant problems of power outages? We as the Reiger Park community have been promised before the winter started that such issues have been sorted out.
Mister President you said, and I quote, “I am pleased to announce that there will not be any load shedding for the whole of this winter.”
Eskom supposedly had enough power in its reserves but yet since June 10, every second week we’ve experienced load shedding.
We have been told it is not load shedding but cable theft. This does not make sense.
I mean if you know of a hot spot for cable thefts then why not engage in security measures. I do not trust this is mere theft, but rather load shedding which occurs for more then 18 hours.
At the end of the day we sit with the damages, such as loss of food that spoils. What is the point of prepaid electricity when we will be left in the dark anyway?
The people of Reiger Park have had enough and sooner or later we will sit with a major crisis on our hands.
To be honest, the opinion on the street is that Reiger Park is being shunned for racial reasons. Such things, after all, seem only to happen in “coloured” communities.
Still today it seems the opinions of this race never seem to matter as our pleas have fallen on deaf ears.
I’m going to say it bluntly that since the fall of apartheid no one still seems to care about the coloured communities.
We after all don’t get jobs as we are “not black enough or white enough”. I know, because this was told to me as well.
It’s getting frustrating to sit with the same problem each and every time but upon reporting it no one seems to care or even show interest.
It’s always “yes we know about the problem and we will attend to the matter as soon as we can” but in fact they mean as soon as they want to.
So now I’m asking as a child and resident of Reiger Park, what is to be done about all this, as this is not the first letter I’ve written to you, Mr President.
