Why The Poor Are Getting F*CKED

         Why the Poor are Getting Fucked

The main reason that the poor will get poorer and the rich richer is simple.

The poor through the ages have been sold a dud and they bought it. Allow us politicians to look after your interest. Let us go way back to the era of serfdom. This was an era where you had the monarchy and those who owned land or rather allocated land by the Monarchy in Europe. Those who owned land colluded with the monarchy to monopolise wealth and taxed the poor hence Communism. Today the politicians collude with those who have capital to ride on the backs of the Poor.

NOW, poverty of the mind is the worst form and it is perpetuated structurally.

In Africa, Jomo Kenyatta put it bluntly that when the Missionaries came to Africa, they had the bible and the Africans the land. They then proposed that we all close our eyes and Pray. When we all said ‘AMEN’. The Missionaries and the colonialists had the land and the Africans the bible.

For the next four centuries the African had to play ‘Catch Up’. As soon as he/she catches up. The rules of the game are changed. Sometimes not by force by or the naturel order of change. Dispossessed in the Agrarian age the African and all the Colonised had their energy sapped to retain the land. Before they even won that war, the industrial age was upon them and their focus was divided and they did not know what hit them. With monetisation and Stock markets allowing for new forms of money. The African had to dig deep, the wars of attrition and the world wars involved Africans in a mess not of their making but paid for it anyway.

By 1896 the war between Church and State that the Europeans had fought 10 centuries earlier was now being played on the African Continent with disposition and Urbanisation thrown into the mix.

The advent of the African Episcopal Missions led by Reverend Dwane of the Ethiopian order within the Anglican Church further divided the African mases with issues of polygamy practise not settled until today.

By the time the computer age came, the African was still spinning without direction and no Statehood with a few countries experimenting with Independence in a system of the Cold War witch was not of their making

This was not what pulverised the poor but what was to follow.

The birth of Career Politicians.

By 1994 most Black Business persons had more money than any returning and existing politician. By 2014 those with political connections were now Millionaires and Billionaires.

 Why?

Well, you see what politicians proposed to Africans was that. Look, let us get rid of the Monarchy by allocating a budget for the Monarchy and the Chiefs so that they do not interfere with the looting .Then let us create a parliament where we will first look after ourselves the judiciary and all organs of state where we will deploy and employ our friends and cronies. This we are doing in the name of you the Poor who we will always refer to as ‘the People’.

We will allocate R3.5bn to the Small Business Ministry where almost R1bn will go to our cronies in administration. Now please tell me that the heads of that ministry have ever run a ‘Spaza Shop’. Now if you have ever run a small business at all .You will know that the responsibility to pay workers at the end of the month is enormous. Anybody who has ever run a small business which is the real job provider can attest to the difficulty of running a business.

Productivity which should be at the heart of any wealth creation process is compromised or even destroyed.

Please tell me that all our parliamentarians are the most productive people in South Africa. And that any of them can walk into any private company and do well?

 My view is that we have a bloated national provincial and inefficient local government-Period!

‘Politicians and Diapers must be Changed Often, and for the same Reason.’-----Mark Twain.

Trickle-down economics has never worked anywhere in the world and in South Africa we are at a disadvantage. A lack of coordination between Institutions of higher learning and the private sector is almost non- existent .In other words the universities are not producing what industry needs but what the government thinks industry needs, no communication.

Now, going forward and to eradicate unemployment to under 5% will not happen under these conditions.

A small glimmer of hope does exist in the exponential nature of technology and if used wisely we may catch up. Put what is also true is that those who are ahead of us are growing exponentially too.

Now South Africa does not have a monopoly of bad governance, it is just that we all expected better and had high hopes for a Democratic State. If the current state of affairs is what they went to jail for all those years, then I have problems with their silence. Or maybe they were just bought off by being made parliamentarians then retired with living support? I am not questioning their sacrifice but their silence. Mondli Gungubele the mayor of Ekurhuleni put it to me and said ‘Mac, Democracy is not a perfect system, but the alternative is too ghastly to contemplate’. While I agreed with him on the sentiment, I still believe that we can do better. And reverse most of what I talked about on this section.

The poor on the other hand will remain helpless and poorer in this decade .I hope that the regular public protests will turn the hearing aid of those in power.

But …I am not holding my breath!