You wouldn’t let it lie…

I remain bedridden on doctor’s orders. One of the things about working with TB is that you don’t play with it when you’re not feeling 100%.
It tends to note your weakness and leaps into your respiratory tract, where it annoys the neighbours by holding late night parties. And killing you.

Being stuck here means that I have borne witness to just one source of reaction to the NPA decision to drop the charges against Zuma – the mobile internet, namely twitter and facebook. And what drama! What hysteria!
Why?
I have two answers: a mild case of shared Münchausen’s Syndrome and a media (and various political parties) which have caused certain sections of the population to believe that the moment Zuma comes to power, South Africa will fall, irretrievably into ruin.
No.

I do not understand what these people hope to achieve by spreading these sensational stories. Of course, everyone has their own agenda and we have an election just around the corner, but as with Trevor Mallach fake letter, let people vote based on FACTS, not on SPIN.
As I mentioned yesterday, the best thing for SA now would be to move on and let this issue lie. But of course, I understand that that option is not viable for some people and parties.
The irony is that they think that their political meddling in the justice system is somehow different from the political meddling in the justice system which prompted JZ’s legal eagles to meddle, possibly politically, in the justice system.

There was never going to be an easy way out of this, and no matter how aggrieved Helen Zille and the DA feel right now, they must realise that others would have felt equally outraged had the NPA decision gone the other way.

The only good thing about what happened today is that we briefly knew where we stood. A moment of clarity, if you will. There was the opportunity for closure, which has already been lost:

@helenzille The decision to drop the charges against Zuma is irrational and unlawful. We will not stand back and let this happen. http://tiny.cc/P4jB6

Not that I am blaming Helen Zille – she has her beliefs and she must stand up for them. Sadly, as this story continues to run, I see only more damage and more harm and hurt on the road ahead.

In times of turmoil, one must look for the simple pleasures in life. Better get back to sucking my Fisherman’s Friend, then. Certainly clears the passages and he seems to enjoy it too.

Written on my Sony Ericsson Xperia X1. In bed.
With a Fisherman’s Friend. Nice.

Two Hats in Hat Swap Shock!

Cape Town Mayor and Leader of the DA, Helen “Two Hats” Zille has been nominated as the DA’s candidate for the Premier of the Western Cape in the forthcoming election.

Speaking with sycophantic radio presenter John Maytham yesterday evening, Zille described the move as being “strategic” and expressed her wish for the DA to work “from the ground up” to “set an example of how good governance can work”.

She said if it could run both Cape Town and the Western Cape, voters across South Africa would realise that service delivery is better in regions where the DA is in power.

“It is a project of national significance. We want to run the city and the province in co-operative governance and demonstrate what it possible under those circumstances,” she said, adding that as mayor she was frustrated by stone-walling on the part of the ANC powers in the province.

This struggle between the ANC controlled Provincial Government and the DA controlled City of Cape Town Municipality has long been cited as the reason for delays in service delivery – most especially housing – and for the objective bystander (that’s me) acts as a shining example of all that is wrong with politics. That is, while the individuals elected to serve the people bicker and attempt to score cheap political points from one another, nothing actually gets done on the ground.
This lack of service delivery is obviously because of the Province, according to the DA and obviously because of the City, according to the ANC. It’s playground politics at its very worst.

Zille’s record as Mayor of Cape Town is undoubtedly impressive. However one must remember that the DA remains a political party and be mindful of spin when looking at her claims of success, which she rolled out one after another in yesterday’s M&G article “The DA Saved Cape Town“.
And even if her numbers stand up to scrutiny (and I have neither the time nor the inclination to scrutinise Helen Zille’s vital statistics) then there is still a lot of work to be done by the DA to overturn the ANC’s Provincial rule. More likely, as Linda Ensorstates in today’s Business Day is the DA holding no overall majority and looking to form a coalition with the ID or Cope: something Zille described as “always complex”.

Whether a coalition (such as the one which the DA have used to run Cape Town for the past three years) represents true democracy is open to debate. But it will be interesting to see how many of those barriers to service delivery are removed should the DA control Province and City. And how many more are “discovered” between Province and National Government. Cynics might suggest that the problem will merely be moved upward and onto a larger scale – something that would hinder service delivery to even greater numbers of needy citizens.