Before we see services being delivered in our townships, those who are supposed to deliver them start living like fat cats, and when we protest, all we get is bullets, pepper spray and water cannons.
People fight for what is rightfully theirs and what they voted for, because they need to develop and grow.
To demonstrate that what our representatives are doing is getting out of hand, we, the community, must protest.
However we won’t just protest; we also want to use protest action to call on senior government officials to get involved.
We don’t accept that our government can’t perform because it suffers from service backlogs.
Police are always on high alert to maintain order during protests, but we condemn the use of firearms and pepper spray against our comrades.
We understand that most police personnel were well trained during the apartheid era to “skiet skiet” and “knock knock”, but times have changed.
The police need to learn or be trained in how to control and negotiate with angry crowds.
Police officers are also members of the community and they suffer when the same services we are fighting for are not delivered.
In Khutsong residents protested against the incorporation of their Merafong municipality from Gauteng into North West.
The demarcation issue first flared in Khutsong in 2005. More protests have seen residents barricading roads, stone police and passing cars, and petrol-bomb several houses.
We also condemn the criminal acts by a small group of opportunistic counter-revolutionaries that use service delivery protests to do injustice to their own communities.
Damaging the property of their own government as a way of improving their lives will not resolve anything.
What must the masses do if they don’t get what they deserve? Should we allow South Africa’s tenderpreneurs, who sing the same revolutionary songs that we sing, to continue mobilising us for their own purposes?
Corruption is out of control and it should be dealt with as a matter of urgency. In doing so, the unions must be included in the investigations that delay service delivery to the community.
Comrades must be careful and vote with sober minds in the next elections.
Source
Numsa News No 2 2010