The Kaka Revolution

 In ancient Greece Kakistocracy meant government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens, but this has taken a different meaning in the Western Capesince faeces started being thrown at politicians and government institutions.

About 80 000 households in the City of Cape Town lack access to basic sanitation. Almost all of these denizens reside in informal areas on the city outskirts of black townships. The City resolved to provide them with PFT (Portable Flush Toilets). 

But people like those in RR informal settlement in Khayelitsha, who has about 4 000 households who needs access to basic sanitation, refused the PFTs (only 400 of them agreed to take them). They cited that they are the same system as the Bucket system – the waste product still needs to be collected. And with all the chemicals, the faeces smell is terrible after two days.

Ther’s no question that PFTs do not advance the human dignity of our people. Most people, especially males, will not be caught dead taking a dump in these ‘potties’ inside the house, with all its accompanying indignity of loss of privacy before their kids and all, so will rather risk going to the wild. Worse still, the PFTs leak and are sometimes not picked up for weeks, or their containers are not returned.

From the audit recently done by SJC (Social Justice Coalition) we know that the City of Cape Town does not have a monitoring system for the providence of these toilets. The audit revealed that the outsourced providers of chemical toilets are failing to deliver on their contracts with the City, like collecting the waste weekly as agreed upon. And that the City’s monitoring and maintenance plan is currently in tatters.  

SJC also mentioned the fact that the City has a Community Engagements problem.  This, I presume, is what prompted mayor Patricia De Lille to go around these communities, checking the situation for herself, which has made her vulnerable to political opportunists who have been following her with ‘turd missiles’, pouring the contents on of PTFs on venues she is speaking at.

It didn't help that mayor De Lille went about the media with a patronising tone that the people prefer the bucket system to toilets. Meantime the community had asked the City to first erect small structures where the PFTs will be mounted and used for each household.  They were prepared to take the PFTs if these conditions were met.

Zak Mbhele, the Premier’s Spokesperson in the Western Cape, recently wrote yet another condescending opinion piece in the Cape Argus, basically putting all the blame for the ‘Kaka Revolution’ on the ANCYL. This is, of course, the DA’s MO once it is caught wanting; blame it on the Youth League and the Third Force, or is it Turd Force now. 

Speculations of trying to make the DA administered city ungovernable are thrown around. We've seen it during the Farm Worker strikes, we have seen it during almost all Service Delivery protests. Even if they are partially correct, this political opportunism does not take away anything from the legitimate rights of people whose only concerns is to get proper sanitation and prevent their children from unnecessary death.

It is good that, for whatever reasons, that the issue of sanitation is back on our headlines. Sanitation is something most of us take for granted. If we had our priorities right, no government will think of investing in anything before it invests on the health of its people, and sanitation is at the center of the health of the people.

We travel everyday through N2 looking at people doing what is called ‘open defecation’. We look at it with disgust. We say they are behaving like animals. We never think about what choices they have. We are looking at them from the perspective of our flushed and plumed world.

Diarrhea is the second killer of children worldwide. It kills more children than HIV, TB, Measles combined. It’s a weapon of mass destruction, and 98% cases of diarrhea come from poor people who stay in Informal houses.

I see nothing wrong if the mayor and the Premier can’t go anywhere without being reminded of the shitty conditions our people live under. The chance, and my wish, is that this ‘Kaka Revolution’ will spread to other provinces also, especially the Free State and Eastern Cape where they still have a bucket systems in use. 

Perhaps then we will open our eyes to the unnecessary tragedy of losing children through diarrhea related disease, because our politicians think building multimillion stadiums is more important than the primary health of our people.

As for Mr. Mbhele, who has entrenched himself on DA’s poached ‘struggle credentials’,  I would like to remind that it is not a ‘false narrative’ sir that the DA government does not care about the poor. Your government does not give a damn what happens in the townships unless it spills over to the N2.  Then, because it affects your constituency driving to the airport, Stellenbosch, Somerset West, Gordon’s Bay, etc, you deploy massive Cape Metro cops to form a barricading wall between the township and the freeway. Otherwise how do you explain the fact that people are daily being attacked at R300 at night, their cars being hijacked and damaged. But no Cape Metro police have been deployed to protect them. Why? Because it’s mostly black people who use that road. Instead when people plan to march about it the Premier tweets false information that the Youth League is planning another strike towards making the city ungovernable.

When the community of Camps Bay was under attack from organized criminal element that were breaking into their houses a special Task Force was deployed there within three weeks. Athlone has been under similar operation from the organized criminal element hardly anything has been done about for months. 

Crime is made into a priority only when it affects the rich and mostly white, like squadrons of police that are deployed along N2 at a slightest provocation & protest.

The truth of the matter is that we are caught between a hard place and the rock between the ANC and the DA. One is concerned with taking us into black led plutocracy with endemic signs of corruption. And the other is running a sophisticated elitists and racist government whose design is to maintain the status quo that was inherited from the apartheid regime. Yet the DA acts surprised when the majority of black people think it is bringing apartheid by the back door.  

What do you call branding people from the Eastern Cape as refugees if not Apartheid Policy of Separate Development? What is behind driving black (Indians, Coloureds and Africans) people out of the province, and then complaining about scarcity of black skilled and educated in the province. 

Four years ago in the Western Cape, Head of Departments statistics were as follows: Coloured (50%); Africans (16.6%); Whites (16.6%); women constituted 25% of HOD’s. When the DA took over power in 2009 this stats changed to this: Whites (62%); Coloured (30.7%), Africans (7.6%); women 23%. Black people are not fit for purpose under the DA, they are either corrupt or incompetent. That's exactly the same thinking that engrossed Verwoerd and Botha.

All these things are a clear indication that the DA wants to take us back to the apartheid era. The only difference and irony is that it now wants to oppress black people with the help and through the vote of black people.

This nonsense also of raising Conspiracy theories whenever one is confounded by a situation they have no answer to is a symptom a failing government. The ANC during Mbeki second term liked this, and this is the period the wall papered cracks in our national dialogue were beginning to be glaring. Now we see the same in the DA. Opportunism is within the nature of politics, and there will always be people who would use your failures for their own vested interests. But does that mean we must explain everything with Conspiracy theories? ANC Councillor houses get burnt in the township, sometimes within the crowds are people wearing DA t-shirts. Has the ANC ever accused the DA for trying to render the country ungovernable because of that?