Public Servants Strike...

And The Empire Strikes Back!

I've been following the Public Servants strike on the news and in the papers over the past two weeks, and by "following" I mean I skipped through the news pages on my way to the comic section, or caught it on the telly as I was flipping channels in search of "Girls Of The Playboy Mansion."

So here's the thing I don't get.
The Public Servants are demanding more money or else they won't go back to school and teach the learners.
The Government is refusing to give them their 8.6% salary increase demand, saying there simply isn't sufficient funds to cover these extra costs.
Learner's are edging closer to matric exams and there's a very high possibility that we may see the year end with thousands of kids without a qualification worthy enough of getting them jobs to clean the very toilets at the schools that have abandoned them.
Through all of this, MP's, politicians and other corrupt bottom-feeders in society continue to scramble over themselves like gluttonous vultures at a Mad-Cow Diseased culling site for tenders and bribes.

The dodgy deals continue unabated; the arms deal has been swept under the carpet; we never heard anymore of the missing millions from the SABC, Eskom and other parastatals.
The fat-cats just get fatter while the country gets over-run with rats.

Quite simply, the chickens have come home to roost... and this once proud land of milk and honey that the ANC inherited with more than it's fair share of problems, and promised to turn into the Utopia we so believed they would, has not materialised.
Sixteen years into our democracy and we still have townships without clean running water or proper sanitation.
The gap between the Upper Class and Lower Class is now so wide, the working Middle Class is simply lost in translation. We might as well just be regarded as being Lower Class too.

It's almost as though a culture of greed and corruption has seeped so deeply into the very fabric of our once proud freedom fighters and social activists, that the cleansing process would require a complete purge of all that we once had faith in, or believed in.
I once was a believer in the ANC.
Then Madiba retired.
Now his legacy has been taken over by henchmen only interested in power and money.

Among my labourers the general consensus is that they the ANC, as fraught as they are with corruption, are still better than the DA.
Rather the devil you know.
There's no trust in the DA, simply because their upper echelons are not truly representative of the nations make up.
Their words. Not mine.
Is there any truth in this?
Possibly. Joe Seremane is the longest serving politician in parliament and a member of the DA.
How many have heard of him, until he was paraded by the DA to score brownie points from non-white voters?
Joe Seremane has since retired.
I'm guessing he finally grew too tired of waiting for Uhuru from his party.

The ID, now in an ANC (Ante-Nuptual Contract) marriage with the DA, would have been a contender for my vote had they not been so focussed on the Cape only, and possibly also if they were a tad less unstable.
Too much firecracker, and not enough pyrotechnics.
Maybe that's just me.
It's great that they're so vocal and always barking in the corridors at the Union Building, but unless that barking is stopping the thieves and waking the owners, i'm afraid all it will ever be is simply noise.
I'm seriously hoping that their merge with the DA will be positive.

I'm excited about the future of my country.
I love the fact that we have this many problems, because it means that we will need to dedicate ourselves to that many solutions.
Only the strong will survive.
I'm also excited about the open debate that people are willing to have about issues such as these that affect them.

And that right there is why the Media Appeals Tribunal (MAT) should not be supported.
In my humble opinion, the ruling party is trying to get the media to clean their stories of damaging reporting on the MAT and only publish that which won't tarnish the image of the corrupt.
Government will have the right to decide what we the public can have access to; what information regarding their dodgy deals and dodgier tender awards we can read about. It's the perfect carpet to hide all their dirty under-handed dealings under.
That's just my opinion.

Wait... how did I end up discussing politics?