So? What's changed? - Thought Leader

Five years ago, this column was published in several South African and European newspapers.

Having survived another half-decade in the land “alive with possibilities”, having changed careers, made history, saved some ordinary people, exposed a fraction of the spooks and crooks that lurk in the shadows everywhere, seen my children to safety in exile, become a grandfather and the glorious split in the ruling kakistocracy, this article remains irrefutably true and relevant — if not more so given the government’s attempts to destroy the land of my birth.
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Why I won’t be voting

After years of voting against things, LLEWELLYN KRIEL wants to vote for something.

IT ALL boils down to TRUST.

And it is because of trust – or more accurately the lack thereof – that I cannot and will not cast a vote on March 1 2006.

As a so-called “privileged” white South African, I have had the right to vote since 1971. Each time I exercised it, I did so as an act of opposition; in defiance I voted against the government.

At no stage did I ever believe the liberal opposition party, whatever its name was at the time, stood the slightest hope of actually winning an election. I voted

against

the National Party because I found their apartheid policies morally repugnant. I firmly believed it was simply a matter of time before their kingdom built of, and on, sand would crumble. My vote for the Progressive Party (now manifested as the Democratic Alliance) was to make a contribution towards the gradual erosion of that odious brand of nationalism.

I trusted in that destiny. My trust was vindicated when F W de Klerk opened the dykes to wash away the abomination of apartheid.

In joyous mood and trusting in a democratic future, I stood with my family, all of them, black and white, and our friends in the carnival queues on April 27 1994 and cast my vote. It was the very first time that I voted for something.

I repeated the process in the first municipal elections. I voted again four years later …

and that was the last time.

I now understand that our electoral system of proportional representation is one which I cannot, in good conscience, endorse. Proportional representation allows for pure majority to forever dangle like the sword of Damocles over our nation, suspended by the thin thread of decency and integrity – two qualities which are as scarce as rocking-horse dung in the ranks of the African National Congress.

Like the Illuminati of old, the ruling party and its alliance goonsquads have already demonstrated their ideological commitment, as profound and unshakeable as any religious zealot’s, to outright domination of the political arena. Our current system of proportional representation places that goal within their grasp.

This is implicit in the “official opposition’s” current campaign. Do not split the opposition, the DA implores, arguing that only it has the power and the will to oppose the might of the ANC and the threat of party tyranny.

The DA is probably correct. After all, it was through their efforts we became aware of the deputy president’s profligate jaunt to the United Arab Emirates and the Travelgate rip-off. That is what an opposition, official or otherwise, does – it opposes. And having heard the voice of opposition, together with the voices of national outrage and the voice of moral integrity rallied against it, the ANC did not offer regrets. No, its leader offered instead deprecating and condescending alibis couched as issues of national precedence. And racism.

Were this an isolated aberration, we may pardon it. The fact that shirking the responsibilities of moral governance is entrenched faith in the ANC has its unwanted pregnancies in the rage of Khutsong. The residents of Khutsong and scores of other communities have had more deprecation and condescension than they are prepared to take.

Anyone who has bothered to dig will hear the litany of individual complaints about service delivery in those towns. It always starts with the individual yapper, doesn’t it? But when the yapping of the individual can so easily be muzzled by the right of might, who cares about the lonely cries of Mrs Mahlangu “wasting (her) sweetness on the desert air”?

The tyranny of majority only heeds the cry of majority.

In the words of Elsie Witbooi from De Aar (world capital of foetal alcohol syndrome): “I asked and asked, but they never listen. Now they see there’s lots of people who are the moer in.”

Service delivery has become a rallying point of next year’s elections – the physical manifestation of what goes wrong when one group becomes too powerful to listen and too complacent to care. But that is the disaster inherent in proportional representation. And where will Mrs Witbooi take her complaints next year?

Is the local bloke likely to be of greater moral stature than the deputy president, or the deputy president before her? The current one couldn’t even muster the integrity to say “Oops. Here, let me give you a cheque”. And her boss fobbed us off with policy. Why should they worry themselves when there is the buffer of outright majority as granted by the system of proportional representation.

In this absurd danse macabre it is the system I find repugnant. It is the system I find unworthy of support. It is the system I no longer trust.

At least I don’t feel alone. According to the Independent Electoral Commission, there are more than six million voters who, like me, haven’t registered. Then if, as some research indicates, voter turnout may be as low as 48% (if the weather is grotty) and, say, only half the eligible voters pitch up, that means some 16-million of us would not have found next year’s little shindig worth the effort … well then, given a total electorate of 27-million, seems we’d be the majority.

Now, that’s a thought, isn’t it?

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In the meantime, we’ve had the ANC immorally and illegally using its majority to crush the only effective crime units we’ve ever had — first the Child Protection Unit (which resulted in an unprecedented rocketing of crimes against children) and now the Scorpions (already organised crime is showing signs of improved tactics and outwitting the ill-equipped, ill-trained teaspoonful of fuzz).

We thankfully saw the long-overdue firing of Mbeki, but by then he’d already killed nearly half-a-million people.

We have the horror looming that a globally despised lover of automatic weapons, who was roundly shunned in the US because he is such an embarrassment (backed by dangerously deranged mental midgets), becoming the next president.

We have an economy which has been pretty well managed, but which has still seen the price of staple foods double and the dreams of owning homes evaporate for an estimated 22-million people. And don’t forget: Trevor is not above the law of the despots and communists.

Our education system is producing matriculants who can scarcely add and subtract, let alone read and write, graduates who can’t get jobs here and have to go back to school overseas to qualify for university entrance. And yet the best and brightest continue to flood out of the country.

We have a healthcare system that is nothing short of a national death trap and, even if fixable, won’t be able to handle much more than a verruca. Let alone get on top of HIV/ Aids.

And we have a telecommunication and IT system dating back to the 1950s, a constantly bankrupt national airline, and a piss-willy underground railroad that is systematically swallowing the Witwatersrand.

We have a currency scarcely more valuable than goatskins and bangles and a tax collector fueling corruption and greed and bludgeoning the working slob to death along the way.

North of us is a dark, visceral, capricious continent enslaved to medieval blood-customs incapable of having a civilised conversation, let alone solving its problems.

And here in the cradle of mankind we are a nation that approaches a night out with the family as if we lived in London in the middle of the Blitz. Society has swung full circle to ordering pizza from Scooters and DVDs from Push’nPlay rather than risk death, rape and mutilation on the streets.

And the solitary light on the horizon is a victory over Wales at Cardiff Arms Park tomorrow. Oh yes, and we did eke out a silver medal in the Olympics. Sharp, hey?

Life is so rosey I could shit! And that is why I will not register to waste my vote this weekend, even if I thought I might be safe doing so.

I can’t be a contributor to national self-destruction. This is my home and I choose to stay here to fight for decency, integrity, honesty, morality, prosperity, accountability and faith — but by my rules, not those of a warped and tyrannical system where the IEC is nothing more than Pontius Pilate washing his hands and kowtowing to the frenzied throngs. And that cellphone call from Msholozi in the night.

The difference between us and the US is (a) change IS possible in America, (b) Barack IS ethical, (c) Barack IS competent, and (d) Barack doesn’t have the ANC, its tripartite death squads or the Zumanator to deal with. If he had faced those insurmountable objects, Tuesday would have been a very different story indeed.

What’s the betting I’ll copy and paste this same blog five years from today?