Justice Malala: "The ANC Must Address Poverty In South Africa. We Need To See Lives Improving Under Freedom"

A creative beggar in South Africa

Asserts the South African moderate-conservative columnist, about abject poverty in his country: "I drive the highways of our land and see desperate people making their homes under bridges, their possessions nothing but filthy bags and cardboard boxes. We have become inured to all this. Our children are growing up in the belief that it is normal to have people knock on your car window and beg. We raise our children with hard hearts. We raise them to believe that we are a defeated people, that we cannot wipe out the scourge of poverty."

Mr. Malala argues that poverty is getting short shrift in the ANC's agenda: "I am sure that many of you will remind me that under apartheid poverty was hidden in the homelands, that influx control ensured that the cities were drained of all poor and unemployed blacks. I am sure it is true. But I am tired of being told things were worse under apartheid. Instead, I want to see examples of life being better under freedom. I want to see poverty being eradicated because of our freedoms. As the ANC, a party which will be in power for at least another seven years, goes to its conference in Mangaung, I wish poverty eradication was higher on its agenda. There seems to be hardly any mention of poverty eradication by ANC members as they prepare for Mangaung."

More: "A huge faction of the ANC merely wants to continue the looting that has been going on at the expense of the poor. It is the sort of self-entitled, unthinking, reactionary looting graphically illustrated by the lies that surround that big house on the hill in Nkandla [President Jacob Zuma's rural mansion, for which he used US$23 million in taxpayer dollars to upgrade], in KwaZulu-Natal. There are beggars at its gates. It shall fall, for it lives in a sea of poverty."