Picture: Roberta Ciuccio / AFP
Dear Mr President, I know you never read or even consider my letters, but the clock is ticking.
It is still not too late to rectify the immense damage your administration has done not only to our country’s image continentally and internationally, but also the immense harm, loss of dignity, and poverty you have inflicted on our people.
Your government has done everything in its power to destroy our hopes and aspirations.
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Our national trajectory is a shining example of utter failure. Our economy is in tatters. More than half of your ministers are implicated in illegal and unlawful activities, yet they remain firmly in their posts.
Why do you cling to ministers who have been named and shamed when it comes to corruption?
In case you have not noticed, people are sick and tired of a government that ignores crime and corruption, especially as crime and corruption have forced our country to its knees. Yet, this is merely glossed over and not taken very seriously by your administration. Besides, criminals cannot be mandated to solve crimes.
Celebrating the opening of a single tap in KZN or lauding the fact that there are now twenty-eight million grant recipients – four times the number of taxpayers – is shocking to say the least.
This is indicative of a failure in infrastructure development as well as mass unemployment.
Your government’s socialist approach incentivises people to not work instead of helping build the economy your administration has destroyed. And to use grants to gain political leverage with the coming elections is despicable and evil beyond description.
In trying to establish a socialist state, it will do your government well to remember the wise words quoted by late British Prime Minister Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of someone else’s money”.
Your disconnected and marginalising economic policies have driven many taxpayers to seek their salvation elsewhere and, as a result, the government has run out of money. But maybe you see this as progress.
The vast majority of the overtaxed South Africans do not. Yet you call on the public to help crowdfund your party and to fix the infrastructure that has been neglected, broken, or stolen by your government. What a shame.
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Our currency is becoming worth less than the paper on which it is printed. And do not blame apartheid, the West, Israel, or Nigeria. These feeble excuses are no longer believed by those whose hope and dignity has been trashed and trampled on by your government.
Essential services are no longer available to the people, even those who do actually pay for them. This is nothing short of disgraceful.
Deploying the SANDF to do policing is nothing other than a silent admission that law enforcement no longer exists. The criminals have won.
Mr President, you had a wonderful opportunity to be remembered as a great African leader.
But you chose instead to lend your ears to self-serving advisors, support pariah states, propagate divisive politics, host meetings with rebel leaders, spew anti-West rhetoric (except when you go hat in hand to beg for money), and focus on the problems of other nations.
Rather fix what your administration has broken.
After almost 30 years of ‘democracy’, we have become a nation of neglect, double standards, nepotism, poverty, hypocrisy, unemployment, crime, and corruption.
It is said that those who live in glass houses should not throw stones. We live in a glass house where the glass that has not been stolen is riddled with cracks. What a shameful legacy we now have and that you will leave.
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Instead of trying to project a power we do not have, why isn’t the government projecting that power in our own country and instituting governance? We poor souls in South Africa are subjected to mass criminality and killings that exceed that of active war zones.
Is that not genocide as well? Where are our human rights? Surely there are more honest and competent people you can chose to be part of your government.
But you don’t want to do that. Instead, your administration has positioned us as a hypocritical, pro-terror, compromised, criminal state.
Sometimes it is better to leave with some dignity than to leave with a legacy that shouts ‘Failure!”
*Mashaba is a political commentator
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