Gauteng premier Panyaza Lesufi should perhaps dream that one day: "Who cares?" might not be our national motto.
Gauteng premier Panyaza Lesufi. Picture: Nigel Sibanda
Our two stories – on Gauteng premier Panyaza Lesufi’s dreams for the future and the actual reality of failed projects across his province – sum up neatly why our country is such a mess.
We talk big, but when the rubber hits the road, we just can’t do it… either through incompetence, looting or both.
Lesufi dreams of a young girl from Mamelodi or Thembisa piloting a high-tech, fabulously fast express train which can get to Polokwane – 300km from Johannesburg – in just 67 minutes.
The province will be a technological hub because there will be scores of smart schools where our bright young people will be given 21st-century skills.
And yet… Dotted around the province are the gutted carcasses of housing projects that have been abandoned – symbolic of how the dreams of Lesufi and the ANC leadership so often fail to come to fruition.
And there have been plenty of grandiose ideas from the premier in the past – ranging from high-speed internet for all schools to the ill-fated Temu cops of the amaPanyaza, who were supposed to supplement the forces of law and order but which no longer function in that way.
Apart from the hundreds of millions – even billions – that have been squandered on infrastructure projects in Gauteng, there is the reality that there have been no consequences for those responsible for the failures.
No prosecutions. No disciplinary hearings. No dismissals.
Worse still, there seems to have been no process to learn from mistakes as useless construction companies are appointed again and again.
So, the failure cycle goes from rinse to repeat.
Government, both provincially and nationally, seems to regard the failures as some sort of Act of God which leaves behind it “challenges”.
Lesufi should perhaps dream that one day: “Who cares?” might not be our national motto.
