• Mark Trump, DA Ward 20 candidate councillor writes:
In response to the letter on the News website with headline Choosing sports over the homeless means we don’t care the following …
Dear Ameline van Oudvorst, hope you’re well and staying safe. I would like to reply to your letter with the intention to bring clarity to the matter.
While your letter may have been written with good intentions, it suffers from a logical fallacy known as a false dilemma. This is when a person only sees two sides of a coin instead of seeing the coin as a whole. Allow me to elucidate with this saying: “A child in sports, is a child out of courts”. Therefore it is not “sports” or “addressing homelessness”, but “addressing homelessness” and “sports”, because sport is one of the quickest poverty-alleviation mechanisms.
Have you considered that many talented children may have found themselves as homeless adults because they lacked the facilities to nurture their talents? What about the fact that working community assets are able to generate incomes which can be ploughed back into the community and address issues such as homelessness or drug abuse?
While your letter may be written in good spirit, it is narrow-minded. A holistic community-based solution is needed.
The revitalisation, rehabilitation and refurbishment of all of our community assets are long overdue, and the ability to have platforms available to alleviate poverty is critical to the sustainability of any municipality. Your proposal simply seeks to address the symptoms and not the cause. If you were a medical doctor you’d be ineffective at curing a patient.
While we are on the causes of decay, destruction, dereliction and homelessness, I’m curious as to why you’d single out DA and AfriForum who have well-informed solutions and yet conveniently ignore the real culprits in this matter: The ANC mis-governance over the past decades?
Perhaps you have an agenda and it’s becoming increasingly clear that it’s not the plight of the poor because no well-meaning person would advocate keeping people sheltered, instead of uplifting, developing and supporting them, to become independent functioning citizens who can contribute to society. Moreover it would seem you, like the ANC, want people to be stuck, sheltered into perpetual cycles of abject poverty.
Also read: Plans for our white elephant aka Bob van Reenen
