Is this what we died for?

If this is the dream they sold our parents, and for which so many people died, it is time to demand a refund.

Police officer monitors the situation during a protest in Mamelodi. Image: Ron Sibiya

It stems from somewhere that the government of our time has the audacity to have ribbon-cutting ceremonies and hand over shacks to our people. And that somewhere is in a room full of those charged with making decisions on society’s behalf.

Do they think because shacks are handed over to people with the barest minimum, society will applaud?

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That while they use our tax money we not question the compromise of dignity, the misappropriation of state resources masked by Covid-19 measures and the lacklustre performance of a government in power for almost three decades?

How can this be the ANC that promised a better life for all that sits in luxurious, leafy suburbs and hands over shacks hoisted on corobricks?

They sold our mothers and fathers a dream so beautiful, so eloquently expressed that it reassured us that those entrusted with realising our dreams were geniuses.

They called it the Freedom Charter. Then, they took ownership of realising it. With the promises of the Freedom Charter, we declared war, at times armed with nothing but stones.

They will present their case to us, those that promised us a plate of dreams and a future of endless possibilities.

Is this the nation for which we buried our brothers who took up arms, that unmarked graves litter the rolling hills of the Midlands?

Did our mothers brave detention for a shadow of the freedom we were enticed with?

They told us that under the banner of freedom, equality would be a right and not the privilege of a few.

We are told that we have and will continue to break down the walls of apartheid.

But what we survive each day with this limited economic freedom is no sign that we are on course towards equality for all.

A minority that feigns victimisation, a minority that claims to the world media that we have reversed the roles of apartheid, yet quietly strips the land and all economic opportunities until they
cannot consume any more.

If this is the dream sold to my parents, I’m here for the refund!