My Take: Cooperation is needed from everyone

The South Coast’s problems have been well documented over the past few years.

There are, of course, the usual complaints about our local municipalities, potholes on the roads and litter on the beaches and elsewhere.

While we should never settle for anything less than the best, maybe we don’t have it quite as desperately bad as we think we do.

ALSO READ : My Take: A matter of death and life

Spare a thought for Harrismith, just the other side of the famous Van Reenen’s pass.

The town was featured on Carte Blanche last Sunday.

What made this episode strike home was that my cousin’s husband appeared – admittedly only for a few seconds.

If it had been the Oscars he may have won an award for best supporting actor in a rather minor role.

Still, he was there and it reinforced the point that water and electricity problems have massively affected the town.

He runs a dairy on a farm just outside Harrismith.

I also worked there once, for about two months, some 24 years ago.

Before starting at the newspaper I worked for my uncle delivering milk every day, except for Thursday when I’d hop in a bakkie with a driver, who’d blast it down the hills into the rural areas of Bergville.

There we would sell maas and polony to anyone who’d buy it.

“Don’t come back till you’ve sold it all,” my uncle would say.

I learnt two things: to pray (when that bakkie was hurtling down those chicanes) and to speak a few sentences of isiZulu.

On a more serious note though, one can only hope that our municipalities, as well as the likes of Eskom et al, get their collective acts together to keep what we have looking as good as possible for as long as possible.

It’s likely to take a lot of teamwork from government and the business sector.

But there’s no doubt that clean, neat, fully functional towns will benefit everyone.

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