Madam – What is the most important thing we need to survive?
Food? – (BUT, we can go hungry for a few days)
Water? – (BUT we can go thirsty for a few days)
Air? – (Hmmm…?)
So then, air is the most important thing we need for survival. Where does air come from?
Plants!
Why then are we not planting more trees and worse still, ruining the ones that already exist? I started this letter with questions, to get us all, especially the government and its workers to realise it, because I just saw a municipal worker cutting branches off a tree just outside my yard.
The tree was not even blocking anything on the road.
Upon asking him he said that it was his job and I must just leave him to it. I tried to explain that he was actually ‘working’ for nothing then, because the tree was not in the way and that he was injuring it in a sense.
To which he straight forward, ‘racially’ stated that it is municipal land, ‘African’ land, ‘his’ land and I must just leave him! Then with rude arrogance, he also cut a few branches facing my yard, that were NEVER ever going to block the road!
After those few, he arrogantly walked away chucking the cut branches across the road, in vacant land, to dry up and blow into my yard?
Also, right there, across the road, I could actually see a tree with ‘possible’ problems of a few branches directly above the road, what the worker was sent to cut off in the first place, BUT he left them and walked away.
Look, at the end of the day, the municipality hardly ever cuts the grass on the pavements outside our yards. (Even though we also pay tax for OUR Africa as well! We maintain and plant gardens there ourselves, that wandering livestock, is apparently free to graze off and ruin? But let me not digress to that issue.)
This letter is to us all, to realise that we should all take the environment into account, and more importantly, also education for the government and its workers, that Mother Nature, in OUR Africa should be treated with respect.
Shane Manilal
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