One man once said to me: "We need South Africa to be a nanny state", and I sat there pondering what that meant. He explained it to me this way: " A Nanny state is a caring state, a state where everyone takes care of each other. Where no content harmful to children is carried in our national media outlets; a state where giving service to the poor is not a public relations exercise.
This was an interesting concept because I had never heard of it. Then the politicians started throwing a concept of a banana state about. This was even more interesting because, even though I had not had the full grasp of it, but it made a bit of sense. Someone explained it to me this way: "A Banana republic is like a proxy-state of the former coloniser. This state will sacrifice the well-being of her citizens at the altar of foreign powers, where anything said by the former coloniser is truth without dispute. A banana state is a joke.
On many occasions people have complained that under President Jacob Zuma, many things have gone wrong and the most recent of those is the infamous Gupta saga. To many, Zuma's perceived inaction in relation to the Gupta thing, the issue about Minister Pule, the issue of our soldiers in the war-torn zones of Syria, Libya and countless other examples, has almost, if not completely, turned our hard-earned democracy into a Banana state.
At a gathering discussing the appropriateness of some of the content shown in the media, Errol Naidoo, Chairperson of the Parent Policy Institute says there's a need for stronger regulation of what the broadcast, online and print media put out there for consumers. He brought up the notion of a nanny state, saying he'd been laughed at when trying to place this idea before the people.
Until the nation takes note of why the young men and women become violent, sex-pests, and so on, we will continue to blame our youth for being irresponsible when it is adults who run the media who continuously feed the youth with all this radaslak content; WWE, SEX and THE CITY, weekend pornographic adverts on some television stations, violent stories in general. These things build up in the mind of the unsuspecting youth. Some of these are inspirational to te youth and thus emulated.
I once said - defending the Black youth from the onslaught of being labelled unruly and violent and criminal and uneducated - among the many reasons that this is so is that our brothers and sisters are brought up by your television programmes like Takalani Sesame, an omnibus of Isiding and Generations etc. These and many others are said to be representative of the lives we lead but truth is there are very few poor people seen on Generations or Isidingo for that matter.
We are made to look up to things that are not even real. The youths choose different programmes and WWE wrestling is among those. This is not the only show but it is yet a valid example. We need a nanny state so that we have a governing system which cares for the well-being of the youth - not necessarily bodily care but care for what they are to turn out to be. The Kenny Kunene's of the world flash lavish life-style before the poor youth and tell them they must do whatever it takes to be successful.
Do we care what the neighbour's son does after school? No! Do we care about the young boys who are forever playing ball in the streets, day and night? No. Instead we look at them as though they have done something to harm us. We are scared of our own youths because we have created them into monsters.
Naidoo was right. South Africa needs to be a nanny state. Yhaaaaa
Friday, 31 May 2013
Tuesday, 21 May 2013
Hands Off Our Initiates: No More Death
A very sensitive subject, this one, if you are a Black South African whose cultures dictate that we must be initiated.
As a Xhosa man who has spent over a decade kwaNdebele and exposed to many other cultures, I have also been exposed to the processes followed by many, with regards to the question of initiation of young boys to men.
It is not acceptable, first and foremost, to expose the activities of these Initiation Camps to those who have not been there and who have not completed the processes, but now that notion is relegated to being a cover-up and nonsensical. By the same token, it is not acceptable to keep activities taking place there a secret if our brothers suffer unjustified deaths.
For many years I have heard my peers from Mpumalanga claiming how safe their processes were and how it is always "you, the Xhosas" who always kill the young men there and expose the secrets of manhood to undeserving eyes. I have heard on many an occasion of how careless the Xhosa men are with young men who seek initiation but I have always refused to take this notion, for I believe that the characters of a few should not be associated with the many.
I am disappointed and angered at hearing of the 23 initiates whose lives were (reportedly) lost during their quest to manhood, yet I will always support our way, the Black Man's way, of earning the title of man. I am not supporting government's tactics- bringing women in these camps, bringing White doctors and other people whose knowledge of our traditions and cultures is prejudiced by the media and anti-African elements to the initiation camps- of interventions. I think it is disrespectful and and perpetuates stereotypes.
The government should empower the Royal Houses to continue with the work they had begun from the ancient of times, way before the Westerner brought forth his ways. I am not saying this will bring an end to the deaths of my brothers, and I am certainly not saying the White systems should have any space there. The incidents that are being reported are dread indeed but there is a way to rid our systems of these elements, as it was in the beginning.
Lisiko lethu eli yaye asinakulityeshela ngenxa yezihelegu ezibangelwa kukungakhathali kwabantu abathile.
As a Xhosa man who has spent over a decade kwaNdebele and exposed to many other cultures, I have also been exposed to the processes followed by many, with regards to the question of initiation of young boys to men.
It is not acceptable, first and foremost, to expose the activities of these Initiation Camps to those who have not been there and who have not completed the processes, but now that notion is relegated to being a cover-up and nonsensical. By the same token, it is not acceptable to keep activities taking place there a secret if our brothers suffer unjustified deaths.
For many years I have heard my peers from Mpumalanga claiming how safe their processes were and how it is always "you, the Xhosas" who always kill the young men there and expose the secrets of manhood to undeserving eyes. I have heard on many an occasion of how careless the Xhosa men are with young men who seek initiation but I have always refused to take this notion, for I believe that the characters of a few should not be associated with the many.
I am disappointed and angered at hearing of the 23 initiates whose lives were (reportedly) lost during their quest to manhood, yet I will always support our way, the Black Man's way, of earning the title of man. I am not supporting government's tactics- bringing women in these camps, bringing White doctors and other people whose knowledge of our traditions and cultures is prejudiced by the media and anti-African elements to the initiation camps- of interventions. I think it is disrespectful and and perpetuates stereotypes.
The government should empower the Royal Houses to continue with the work they had begun from the ancient of times, way before the Westerner brought forth his ways. I am not saying this will bring an end to the deaths of my brothers, and I am certainly not saying the White systems should have any space there. The incidents that are being reported are dread indeed but there is a way to rid our systems of these elements, as it was in the beginning.
Lisiko lethu eli yaye asinakulityeshela ngenxa yezihelegu ezibangelwa kukungakhathali kwabantu abathile.
Monday, 20 May 2013
Social Media: A Blessing and A Curse
As former President Thabo Mbeki once expressed skeptical views on social media and its role in the advancement and development of democracy, I had my reservations about his views, dreading they might be out of date, but today I stand with him.
Positive and negative propaganda in politics and in the general livelihoods of communities and nations, has received widespread coverage in the news through the various social media platforms. People have attacked each others' persons and families through the many forms of social media. People have been set up for abuse and even death, through this very space we so love. But is it a good thing?
I am saddened, moreover, at the news that Saturday's death of Morning Live anchor and radio personality, Vuyo Mbuli, is said to have reached the ears of his daughter through social media. O! What a sad thing. I am deeply hurt when thinking that, as reported in some quarters, his wife learnt of the man's passing through social media. Whether these reports about his wife learning of his death through social media, are correct or not, still the questions of morality and dignity must be posed.
How many times have people been sued for slander? How many people have been killed because of what Mbeki termed "false knowledge", propagated and couriered in and through social media? Muammar El Gaddafi was killed because someone propagated, through social media, that the Libyan government intended to slaughter thousands of civilians, when those closer to the situation there claims otherwise - that in fact it was the Westerners (Britain, AmericaObama and France) who designed and disseminated such false knowledge.
I can only imagine how Vuyo's family might have felt at learning of the death of their beloved through ill-disciplined means. Death is a very serious thing and Black people treat it as such. Elders of the family are responsible for informing everybody else about it when it happens because they have the skill, the discipline and the way to put the words, so that the people they inform don't collapse to meet their own death at hearing the news brought by the elders.
If, indeed, it is the case that Mbuli's passing was primarily communicated to members of his family through social media, then all these aspects are ignored and his family disrespected. There are a lot of good things about social media, no doubt, but I am of the view that it is not always the best instrument to convey communication, and this I say not as a Journalist but as a Black man. We are forever grateful to the Facebook people, the Twitter handler and his hashtag, Skype men and the rest of them for developing these technologies, but the truth is that these can be so harmful.
I have no more to say on this...
Positive and negative propaganda in politics and in the general livelihoods of communities and nations, has received widespread coverage in the news through the various social media platforms. People have attacked each others' persons and families through the many forms of social media. People have been set up for abuse and even death, through this very space we so love. But is it a good thing?
I am saddened, moreover, at the news that Saturday's death of Morning Live anchor and radio personality, Vuyo Mbuli, is said to have reached the ears of his daughter through social media. O! What a sad thing. I am deeply hurt when thinking that, as reported in some quarters, his wife learnt of the man's passing through social media. Whether these reports about his wife learning of his death through social media, are correct or not, still the questions of morality and dignity must be posed.
How many times have people been sued for slander? How many people have been killed because of what Mbeki termed "false knowledge", propagated and couriered in and through social media? Muammar El Gaddafi was killed because someone propagated, through social media, that the Libyan government intended to slaughter thousands of civilians, when those closer to the situation there claims otherwise - that in fact it was the Westerners (Britain, AmericaObama and France) who designed and disseminated such false knowledge.
I can only imagine how Vuyo's family might have felt at learning of the death of their beloved through ill-disciplined means. Death is a very serious thing and Black people treat it as such. Elders of the family are responsible for informing everybody else about it when it happens because they have the skill, the discipline and the way to put the words, so that the people they inform don't collapse to meet their own death at hearing the news brought by the elders.
If, indeed, it is the case that Mbuli's passing was primarily communicated to members of his family through social media, then all these aspects are ignored and his family disrespected. There are a lot of good things about social media, no doubt, but I am of the view that it is not always the best instrument to convey communication, and this I say not as a Journalist but as a Black man. We are forever grateful to the Facebook people, the Twitter handler and his hashtag, Skype men and the rest of them for developing these technologies, but the truth is that these can be so harmful.
I have no more to say on this...
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