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
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