EDITOR – There is a lot of speculation from various people regarding the idea of Save Our Berea putting up candidates in the forthcoming municipal elections.
Many of our supporters have gone as far as suggesting that we should do so. This is not our intention, and when we first started Save Our Berea, we made it clear that we were not aligned to any political party.
We are a civic association that enjoys the freedom of supporting the issues we think are important regardless of the stance of any political party. This freedom of opinion, that we enjoy, comes from the fact that we do not owe allegiance to anybody but ourselves. We are not looking for votes so can be true to our own beliefs regardless of whether they are popular or not.
Although, we both have a political party history we believe that the present political system does not work well in our Constitutional democracy. Politicians tend to be beholden to their political masters and are forced by their caucuses to vote as a political block. There are no free votes and because in most instances politicians are not directly accountable to the voters, we see that this is a massive weakness. This leads to a situation where for example, a president can hold his own party and the electorate to ransom as we are seeing at the moment in South Africa.
We would be lying if we said that we had never considered standing for election. We have, but except for a specific set of circumstances arising, we rejected this option. We are seeing the emergence, throughout this country and overseas, of powerful civic action groups that bring different political ideologies together while keeping the political parties on their toes. We are one of those.
We have held “face to face” meetings with politicians from both the major political parties as well as municipal officials. In every case we have been well received and have been brutally honest where we believe that these politicians and their parties can and should improve.
The underlying foundation of Save Our Berea is our strong belief in the Constitution of South Africa and the rule of law. For this reason we believe that the by-laws in our city must be enforced. If there are laws that we feel are wrong, then these can only be changed through democratic processes and citizen consultation.
Our emphasis is to attack the proliferation of corruption, cronyism and arrogance in our city and country. While this attitude is rife, then we will see our taxes squandered and a total lack of service delivery. We tend not to put our resources into dealing with the grass root lack of service delivery because we hold the strong opinion that this situation is caused by bad management, which in turn is a by-product of corruption, cronyism and arrogance.
This is where we will continue to serve the citizens of Durban – as unpaid activists who believe in the concept of a Constitutional democracy and all its benefits for the citizens of South Africa.
Kevin Dunkley
Cheryl Johnson
Save Our Berea
