President Cyril Ramaphosa would have us believe that Tintswalo is the epitome of the ANC’s success.
We went out in search of Tintswalo.
Guess what? She’s a figment of his and his whole band of loyal ANC looters’ imagination.
Trying to find Tintswalo was a by-product of Ford Motor Company’s annual Rally to Read project.
Rally to Read delivers donations of educational material and resources to disadvantaged schools in the Gqeberha area of the Eastern Cape.
It’s an initiative with the Department of Education and Read Foundation that includes Elukholweni Primary School, WB Tshume Primary School, Nomathamsanqa Primary School, Nkuthalo Primary School, Rocklands Primary School, David Vuku Primary School, Empumalanga Primary School, and Mzomtsha Primary School.
Mr President, I doubt you or any of your executives have recently driven unaccompanied through Motherwell, because you prefer big black SUVs and a string of blue lights to push us out of the way so that the serfs are kept in place and can see how important you are.
You no doubt know, but don’t care, that the place is a grim, crime-infested, filthy cesspit.
Finding Tintswalo here won’t be easy.
She has to make her way to school through human waste and heaps of refuse clogging the streets and intersections, all the while trying to avoid being accosted by gangs, drug dealers and pimps.
Once she gets to school, the doors of the classroom have been stolen and installed at a recently erected informal settlement.
When teachers and community members try to take them back, they’re told that the school would be burnt down if they attempted to retrieve what was theirs. Occasionally, they have to take refuge at other schools because her school is under siege by thieves, thugs and gangsters.
The electricity infrastructure has been stolen and so has the recently installed wi-fi. Your SAPS stands around, unwilling and ineffective.
Here’s the thing, Mr President, it’s not the ANC that’s looking after Tintswalo.
In fact, thanks to the destruction brought about by those deployed cadres who you’re in charge of, you have done everything possible to hamper her progress as much as possible.
The reality is that if it wasn’t for the private sector, Mr President, Tintswalo’s life would be even more miserable.
It breaks my heart because once they wave goodbye with broad smiles and a glint in their eyes, it’s back to the dreary, miserable surroundings you have left them to suffer in.
It was your job, your responsibility, no, your moral obligation, after our first free election to see to it that the Tintswalos you so smugly tell us about exist.
Instead you, your predecessors, your ministers, your deputy ministers, your Cabinet, members of the national executive committee and that massive public sector organisation that we fund, stuck your snouts in the trough and stole, looted and pillaged as much as you could, with impunity and no repercussions, at the expense of Tintswalo.
We don’t believe your platitudes in the paternal way you talk down to us anymore, promising things you know full well will never happen.
In the immortal words of Joseph Welch when he addressed US Senator Joseph McCarthy: “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
* Van de Putte is Independent Media’s motoring co-ordinator.
Cape Times