It is not so much about the fact that all people living in the informal settlements in the Cape don't like the Democratic Alliance, but about whether or not the Democratic Alliance loves the poor people.
On many an occasion, the DA leader, Mama Helen Zille, has gone to the areas designated by the Apartheid baboons for Black people, and for many instances she has returned with a long list of demands and wishes. Topping those lists and demands will always be the issues of sanitation, electricity and housing.
We have now come to accept that indeed the housing backlog is not the issue facing the Western Cape alone, so we must be kind to Mama Zille on this issue. However, it must be known to her and the Mayor Ms Patricia De Lille that the bucket toilet system will not be tolerated. I refuse to even look at the technology of the new toilets that she brings "because they are the improved version of the bucket". People don't want to have to pick up that which they have laid waste upon, especially that type of waste.
A kid in Khayelitsha uses of the embarrassing toilet in the full view of the sun and the public. Photo: WestCapeNews
The picture above and many others which were made public following the inhumane manner in which the poor people in informal settlements are being forced to help themselves when nature calls. Some argued that these were better than not having a toilet at all; saying that these people used open fields before these toilets were brought to them. What nonsense! The DA-led Western Cape faces challenges like any other provincial government but that is no reason to dehumanize mankind like this.
The bucket system toilets used in Khayelitsha and many other parts of informal Cape Town under the DA.
De Lille is projecting herself to be hard on hearing by forcing the issue that her new technology is better than the systems shown in the images above. It is a sad reality that not many in the poor people's circles want to see or hear anything she has to say until she addresses this, but a reality nevertheless. If De Lille wants the poor to listen to her and buy into her "Inclusive City" rhetoric she needs to either prove to US, the poor, that she, too, uses the same systems she wants us to use.
De Lille must tell the public that she is switching from the good system of sanitation she uses, to the new buckets she is subjecting our people to. That until she says no more bucket systems for the poor, and that until she says sorry to the poor for seeming so hell bent on humiliating them, she will be booed, not listened to and probably insulted.
She needs to stop being political and begin to be a mother for second or two; she needs to say to her people in government: "I was once a PAC member. There, we respected the African person and we fought for a socialist approach to matters of humanity and dignity - I will not stand to humiliate them in this time as a DA leader". This is what she needs to do. She needs to apologise to Mama Zille for the buckets of waste that were hurled at her entourage and take responsibility for the actions of the poor, if she stand for and with the poor. But if she is now an elitist like the political party she now represents, she will continue to blame the youth league of the under-performing African National Congress (ANC).
She should know better - that the statistics of 2011 which revealed that over 90% of people in informal settlements have proper sanitation - because it is a well known fact on the ground that this is not true. People are forced to share toilets with over 10 households. What is this?
De Lille must go to Philippi again and humble herself before the people in realization that she does not serve the DA when in that office but serves the whole of the City. No more humiliation. No more throwing of stones and fingering other people, you are the one in office now, just serve the people.
Just serve, Mama De Lille and stop politicking!!!
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