Military vets hostage situation no surprise

Remember that time in high school when you really liked that other cute kid? Y’know, that one you couldn’t stop thinking of but didn’t have the guts to talk to?

When you did eventually stomach the guts, the conversation was short and awkward and revolved around something arbitrary like comparing the colour of your moms’ curtains. Then you got all sad because you couldn’t believe that the cute kid didn’t want to be with you despite you not asking.

Yup, we’ve all been through that, but you know what we didn’t do? We didn’t lock the kid up in a classroom and demand to speak to their parents so we could get our way.

Our politics is all messed up because all of a sudden, everybody is allowed to be right. Sure, you’re allowed to have your opinion but it doesn’t mean that your opinion/view is auto-right.

In the last year, we’ve had protests, riots and now hostage situations. I never thought I’d miss strike season since that seemed mild. Guess what we haven’t had…any real political discourse.

You’d think if the vets were unhappy, there would be a meeting to iron things out, but even if there was a meeting, it’s not like the vets would care about the difficulties of corrupt administrators.

Then again, it’s not like the corrupt administrators will care about the vets who have served their purpose (save for once every election cycle).

Following a whole two unclaimed opportunities in the Constitutional Court, Zuma’s claim that he didn’t get a fair trial plunged KZN into riots…just because the faction believed it should get its way and if it didn’t, it was justified in taking action.

Obviously this is far from an ideal state of affairs since normalising physical protest action to reach political gains somewhat undermines the state of our politics. I mean, it would be amazing if we stopped paying 400 MPs a bar a year for abusing the term “point of order”, but it would be preferable to get them to do their jobs rather than let chaos reign.

The problem is that when nothing is done, or at least seen to be done, you can’t blame people for taking action. By extension, when things get done because people took action, you can’t blame them for thinking that’s how to get things done…and when people get things done like that, you can’t blame the country’s “leadership” for focusing on preventing the biggest threat rather than addressing the more important matters.

Let’s admit that it’s pretty great to see ANC politicians taken to task by the vets they’ve been using for votes since ’94, but with an election days away, why did the threat have to be physical? Would it be ineffective for the vets to announce a boycott at the polls? If it would be ineffective, then yes, our politics is screwed, but if it would have been effective, why was that not the go-to option?

All over South Africa when disgruntled members of the public want to take action, they aim at obscure places. Did the crushing of people under pallets of quarts in the riots provoke the release of Zuma? Probably not. But despite options of political and judicial tools, the go-to option was to take to the streets.

This is the problem with high unemployment; people have time to do ineffective things to the detriment of us all.

And this is where we are; a country where the lights burn during the day yet our electricity costs more and is switched off at night because there isn’t enough of it.

How have we responded? Erm, some people complained on Facebook, I guess.

Let me let you in on a little secret; the people in charge don’t care if you take to the streets. They keep their jobs and their salaries regardless. If you want to make a real change, you need to stop pretending that you’re right just because you’re entitled to be, galvanise enough critical mass and make the people with decision-making power feel the heat that they may not get next year’s Range Rover.