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I am from the rural areas of Bushbuckridge
in Mpumalanga and as South Africans in the cities I started living in when I
left home for my studies celebrate the various freedoms that came with our
democracy nearly two decades ago, I feel areas such as the one I come from have
very little to celebrate. People from villages in the area get tricked every four
to five years during national and municipal elections as representatives of
various political parties would promise the poor a better life, a life where
they also don’t have to live in fear because there would be better policing.
They often believe these promises that are seldom or never met.
As South Africans from the rest of the
country celebrate the milestone of 19 years since our parents voted for the
first time, my province of Mpumalanga has announced that two municipalities
have been placed under administration. This is the same province that has
failed to produce favourable Matric results despite all the tweaking and
changes that happen which are done so it is much easier for high school pupils
to pass.
We get the lowest pass rate in the country so no, the government’s
reduction of the pass mark to just thirty percent hasn't helped us. It has also
become common to hear news reports about Mpumalanga pupils who get caught
trying to or having cheated in their national exams and a lot of the time it would
become clear that it would be with the help of adults that would have passed
their Matric. There is no freedom in the knowledge that someone in authority
would leak a paper to high school kids just so they can pass a subject they wouldn't have studied properly for. In fact, that is a trap.
When our municipality was placed under administration I also heard that we owe millions of Rands to the water board for a resource that is a basic human right. This basic human right has caused problems in other parts of my province as recently while watching The Cutting Edge, an investigative programme on SABC 1, I realised that like us, some other people in my province have no running water in their homes. This has resulted to them fetching water from communal taps and where there are no communal taps, they would drink what has been found to be toxic water from the ground which has caused diseases in some people. Authorities ignore their pleas, deny there is a problem and that any disease is caused by contaminated water they are forced to drink because of negligence by some municipalities.
Whenever I am home in Bushbuckridge, I know
that I must always return to basics of pushing a wheelbarrow for 5km to fetch
water from a communal tap. This is something people of my rural village don’t
complain about anymore, it is what people do and have always done. To them,
things just are what they are and they feel powerless.
I can almost guarantee that if
Bushbuckridge was in Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal or perhaps the Western Cape, some
of these problems would have been fixed. The media would probably assist in
getting them fixed. Daily in the press we read stories of the plight of people
in the outskirts of Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town but it is not daily that
we would read about specific rural areas. We read about the rural areas as if
it’s some generic place with problems that are the same and thus would have a
common solution.
Our freedom hasn't even granted the people of the rural areas
access to the media as journalists don’t go there. They sit in their
comfortable homes and drive out to stories that are easy to reach. If they came
to areas such as my home town, Bushbuckridge, then maybe they would have a
better understanding of what people here go through on a daily basis.
Thereafter they would have a clearer picture of what they are asking about when
they talk of the rural areas when questioning authorities sitting in the Union
Buildings in Pretoria or in parliament in Cape Town. While the media is free to
publish any story it has investigated, the impoverished are still largely
ignored.
In 2013 we read about how a black man is
now on par with the white man, often we see results in seats of power. But
those results don’t reach areas like Bushbuckridge where there are black people
who also suffered under apartheid. They suffer today still, nineteen years on.
Zanele, thank you for using this platform to reveal how oppressed we still are as a country. I feel you have the will power to educate others in your immediate community about social activism, about demanding services which are due to citizens , about expecting high levels of efficient delivery to tax/rate paying community members. Zanele you are the voice your community needs, in recent years we've witnessed how groups such as Section 27 and others are using the power as citizens to demand more from government, associate your self with or establish a social activist group . Be part of the solution apart from being the first to identify it, I can predict this will be harder done than said, but your community members will not yield any benefits from a blog post. Correspond with the MDDA ( Media Diversity and Development Agency) and push them to lobby hard for rural life coverage in our mainstream media. Thank you for taking the first step in social activism, the mountain track is still a long way.
ReplyDeleteFrom a semi-free suburban in the Capital.