After twenty-seven years of democracy I asked myself what has changed for us in the city of Durban. For those of us who lived during the apartheid era, and now in the post apartheid era, life has gone worse for us. Prior to 1990, we could not walk, swim on the Durban beaches, because of all the apartheid police of separate amenities act, segregation act based on the colour of our skin.
After thirty years later we cannot swim their because the water is polluted with waste sewage, a chemical company dumping their waste in the sea, causing medical problems for our citizens who are swimming there, the ecology is damaged causing environmental catastrophe in the area and the municipality is slow to resolve these problems, when the damage is done. We cannot even walk at the city centre, it is so unsafe because of the high crime rate, muggings, and robberies. There is no safety and security in the city centre.
We had over 600 thousand HIV/Aids deaths in our country, and thousands of deaths in Durban and surrounding areas, I heard the other day we had over two hundred and fifty thousand deaths with Covid-19 complications.
This week I heard of two cruel incidents of mismanagement, one is R150 million tender fraud. This money could have bought vaccines, protective gears, oxygen and ventilators, this digital vibes communications process was not called for, the another incident was R300 million went to the wrong people in the arts and culture department.
Many thousands of our nurses, doctors, and health workers did not receive their vaccines and past a way leaving their families, grieving, distress and suffering in pain.
A month ago I was reading a book called the Great Pretenders, Race and Class under ANC rule by Ibrahim Harvey. I was almost frightened to read his research in his book, he alerted us about the terminal crisis the country was going through, the greed, corruption, bad management in municipalities, riddled with greed, corruption, some rogue politicians with their own selfish agendas, billions of rands stolen stated by the Zondo commission.
The BEE policies, the affirmation action and cadre deployment, creates animosity between the others groups e.g. like the Indian and coloured communities were thousands of young people unemployed, and they are lost hope in this country.
To my fellow candidate councillors, are you taking note of our concerns as people? Do you the differences between leadership and management, according to Professor P Kotter in his book called A Force For Change, it is similar in some ways, they both involved in deciding what has to be done, creating networks of people and relationships that can accomplish a certain agenda, and then trying to ensure that those people actually get the job done.
Leadership is about establishing a direction, developing a vision for the future, aligning people, and communicating that direction by influencing people to that vision and strategies for change. Motivating, inspiring and energising people to overcome political bureaucratic structures and resource barriers to change and to satisfy human needs.
Management and budgeting, organising and staffing, controlling, and problem solving are predicting the outcome for change. We, from civil society organisations need to put pressure on the municipality to re-engineer, reconstruct, start all over to change corruptible municipalities in our beautiful city of Durban. To build a moral, unethical leadership, skills and management styles to lead, govern, us, anything less is a travesty of social justice and a lack of moral conscious to servant leadership.
I have a dream that children will not fall in latrines and die, that waste sewage will not flow on roads and in houses and that rivers of fresh water and oceans of it will be given free to all our people, after all it belongs to God not profit and corrupt corporate companies. Then will I call this a new Durban, South Africa.
Livingstone Jacob
