THE GOOD ALTERNATIVE TO BAASKAP AND CORRUPTION
Across the Western Cape, people are asking hard questions. They are questioning whether their loyalty to the old South African parties has actually benefited their families and communities.
They are questioning why the people they elect from their communities to represent them don’t appear to wield any power in their parties. Their representatives’ only job, it seems, is to rubber stamp the baaskap and/or corruption – often both – of the high and mighty.
That is why areas of George, such as Pacaltsdorp, remain stuck in the quicksands of inequality, poor service delivery and poverty. The people have regularly voted for the party leading the municipality. But while other areas of George are developed, conditions in Pacaltsdorp remain as they were under apartheid.
The same applies in the Saldanha Bay Municipality, where the people of Vredenburg remain stuck in over-crowded and unsafe conditions, treated as second-class citizens, while their councillor approves first-world improvements in Langebaan.
And the same applies across Cape Town, from Bishop Lavis to Bishopscourt, and from Langa to Llandudno..
South African politics is undergoing change. The Covid pandemic has amplified the inequalities in our society, while those elected to power – at all levels of government – have continued to loot the peoples’ money for themselves and their parties.
• While fishermen are denied access to the sea.
• While farmworkers are pushed off farms.
• While teenagers turn to drugs, because there’s little else to do, and then to crime to pay for their habits.
• While good people struggle to put a crust of bread on the table for their children to eat.
• While teenagers
Peoples’ patience is running thin. It leads to ugly confrontations such as recently seen in Senekal in the Free State – and now Brackenfell, in the Western Cape.
The GOOD Party has a four-legged policy, based on fairness and redress, to achieve social, economic, spatial and environmental justice for all.
Justice is not served when the powerful and untransformed cabals running towns like George and Saldanha Bay make sure to always put the interests of privileged people first.
Justice is not served when the son of the councillor in charge of George’s finances scores handsome commission’s for transferring the town’s savings to a new account.
Justice is not served when the Saldanha Bay officials use precious temporary jobs under the Expanded Public Works Programme as political sweets to reward their followers.
What distinguishes the GOOD offering from that of all the other parties is our firm position that elected community representatives must put the interests of their communities above the interests of their parties – above the interests of the tenderpreneurs, and the oubase and oumissiese.
Ends