EDITOR – What a joy it was to receive my copy of the South Coast Sun and on the front page, read more about the kind of social entrepreneurship that makes the Amanzimtoti area so very special.
I look forward to observing the progress of the adaptation movement and assisting wherever I can.
Wheelchair surfing and special facilities for disabled people? I love it.
I have often spoken with pride to people in the north of eThekwini regarding the things that we do in Amanzimtoti through our civil society initiatives. Many of which do not accept government funding so that they avoid political coercion. The usual response is for their eyes to glaze over, mutter things about ‘these people’, question who is supposed to be responsible for the task and then in a supersilly way, begin to demand that they are to be the responsible adults, if their expenses are affordable.
My interest in localism, mutualism and subsidiarity has always led me to observe that when there is incompetence and failure in authoritarian central government, it is civil society that takes over. In Nigeria, commercial centres have sprung up around churches because the churches are community centres. In Congo, it is quite customary to send letters via the Catholic churches. The churches however are but one echelon in civil society, and the development of non-government organisations and non profits augurs well for the future of any country that seeks growth and progress. The shared future conversation is an exercise in mutualistic responsible citizenship within a community that pulls together. It is not to be confused with the concept of responsible citizenship that is irresponsibly used as a buzzword by political parties who plainly seek to hijack the concept of citizens being responsible toward each other and convert it into a euphemism for robotic and slavish submission to their particular party.
So the front page made me happy, and then I turned to the letters page to be greeted by a letter that demanded delivery of a certain service because we are not rich Umhlanga people who can pay for them separately.
My response to the writer is to say that government dependence is a drug like sugar. You need to be weaned off it rather rapidly. There is no political party that will provide the jobs or security that we need. Political idolatry is futile. South Africans of all shades do not know what it is like to live under a subsidiary relational government. In both the old order and the new order, it is only the colour of the rulers that has been changed in order to preserve the role of diverse serfs in a re-arranged pecking order of Fascist Socialist domination.
Another letter sets forth an exercise in Soviet Russian semantics surrounding the concept of disinformation (which was actually introduced by the Americans). The correspondent then seeks to establish his credentials as a reader of Max Du Preez, to establish a confirmation bias which tries to undermine the role of the members of a certain political party, who are engaging in a campaign to communicate their intentions to behave in a certain way, if elected.
This is electioneering at worst, but it is not a ‘disinformation campaign’. The public are not stupid. The poor attendance showed that many citizens ascertained the insincerity of the ‘protest march’ by the government, for the government and against the government. They have sent a message that the politicians sharpen their pencils and bring more rationality into their cognitive dissonance.
My point is that the people involved in the effective policing campaigns have honest intentions, even if they are political partisans. They were attempting a conversation with Amanzimtoti civil society, and not a sinister campaign to misinform them. Stop sowing unnecessary suspicion among the citizens please. Stop feeding totalitarian narrative. You may have lived by the sword in the past, but there is no need to die for it in the future.
My opinion is that some people don’t know what they don’t know and they would sonorously disagree with it if they did (an Irish expression).
The shared future conversation of a vibrant civil society is alive in Amanzimtoti. Let us not suppress it.
Re-moralise the government and the markets. Re-invest in families and communities. Re-capitalise the poor and oppressed.
KEITH DOWNS
Private Citizen
