AZAPO - Azanian People's Organisation

As the year 2009 recedes and we look forward to the new one, we would be justified to pray for the disappearance of the many adverse factors attending our lives. Chief among them would be the world economic squeeze which has seen to the contraction of our national wealth, the loss of about a million jobs and the intensification of poverty in our country. Being officially the most unequal society in the world, this scale of job losses is the last thing we need.

Mass poverty is by far the most serious enemy our country faces. It is simply not sustainable to have so much grinding poverty coexisting with enormous opulence and conspicuous consumption, bordering on the obscene. To make matters worse, the poverty divide is by and large still along racial lines.

Those who were rich yesterday are still the owners of the wealth of the country today, joined by a few blacks who tend to receive almost all the criticism of the still psychologically oppressed commentators. These are people who have their gaze firmly fixed on the few blacks who own less than 2% of the wealth of the country, as measured by JSE listings, and ignore the 98% still in the hands of the white population.

To these commentators, there is something particularly detestable when black people own something, but perfectly natural or God ordained that whites should own the wealth of the land.

If the issue of mass poverty is not attended to as a matter of extreme urgency, this country might descend into chaos sooner than most of us imagine. Obviously, the economic recession we are going through only adds to the difficulties that the poor face.

Severe as it might be, the economic meltdown will pass sooner or later. What is even more frightening in our country is the acceleration and entrenchment of corruption.

On a daily basis, we are bombarded with corruption stories in Correctional Services or Home Affairs or this or the other province. Corruption is becoming a way of life for many and we are becoming numb and desensitized about its fundamentally evil nature. People talk about it matter-of-factly, without the expected level of shock or revulsion.

In the dawning 2010, let us fight harder against the scourge of corruption. It is much more difficult to grow the economy, create jobs and fight poverty in an environment infested with rampant corruption.

As we have said before in AZAPO, one way of fighting corruption is to appoint people into positions on the basis of merit, qualifications and competence only. Similarly, tenders should be awarded on merit and ability to do the job. Corruption thrives better in offices occupied by incompetent people.

There is a sense in which the appointment of people into positions for which they do not qualify can be regarded as corruption. How do you then fight corruption with incompetent people who were appointed in a corrupt process?

It is our duty, if we want a good country in which to raise our young into worthy adults, to fight corruption with all our might. A country, in which police, prosecutors, magistrates, judges, prison authorities, business people, government officials and others are corrupt, is not a country worth living in. We should never find ourselves in a similar position as Italians in years gone by when their police, judges, politicians and other important people in society were in the pockets of the Mafia.

We are confident that our country will host a successful FIFA World Cup in the dawning year. We trust that we will all enjoy the spectacle and that our guests would find us ready to give them an unforgettable experience.

Together with the rest of humanity, we would urge all countries of the world to ensure that climate change negotiations scheduled for the second half of 2010 are a success, so that the task of saving our planet for posterity can start in earnest.

by Duka @ 30 Dec 2009 07:28 am

In few days we should know who made it or did not in their Snr Certificate exams and ONLY from these results the country will do what it does each and every year, critisize our education system and please note that there has not been anything wrong with critisizing our education system.
My problem is our timming of doing it and which Grade(Std for my generation)we mostly focus on.
Question being : Should we have been consistent with monitoring and making inputs to our Education system from the First day a Child start to attend school, would we not know earlier what Snr Certicate results would be instead of always only learning of them come January each year ? angry