A VIEW OF THE WEEK: Potholes and robberies should shape votes, not blind loyalty | The Citizen

There is a hole outside my child’s school. The kind of trench that is dug up when a pipe is repaired and then is never filled by the Joburg Road Agency. More than half the road has now been closed off for the last three months, with a daily routine now in place to navigate it for all those who use the incredibly busy route past the school.

Over time, the small patch of road left has begun to erode, and a growing pothole is eating away at what remains. Soon, very soon, the whole road will be one big hole and will need to be closed, likely for a long time.

So I was very pleasantly surprised the other day to see Rise Mzansi’s mayoral candidate Lukhona Mnguni on the road during peak hour, directing traffic himself, and starting a petition to put pressure on the City to do what taxpayers expect them to.

He was there the next day too, and his petition grows as the hole in the road does.

Mnguni has, in recent weeks, been in other parts of the city, meeting with taxi operators and commuters, and on the ground during the latest Pickitup refuse-collection disaster.

He has been solving daily struggles, not through empty promises on podiums like some or in flashy social media videos like others. It is this investment in communities, not just for the camera, that makes an impression on voters.

What doesn’t help is telling people to vote for a party that has been part of a problem that makes you so traumatised you want to leave the area you have called home for years.

Former minister Naledi Pandor is a distinguished politician with large support both here and abroad, but was recently asked if she would dip her toes back into active politics and run for Tshwane mayor. Her response spoke so loudly it was deafening.

“People from Tshwane robbed me in my house at gunpoint. I have no interest in it at all. I cannot wait to go home, actually. I would not be interested. I had a horrible experience,” she said.

The violation and trauma of being held at gunpoint should never be minimised, and no one can blame her for feeling how she does. But the fact that she then encouraged South African to vote for the ANC and even offered to campaign for them was astonishing.

Did someone with such intelligence really not see how the ANC had failed to control the very crime she now fell victim to? Or is crime only terrible when it personally affects her?

Hundreds of thousands of South Africans have had the very experience she had, all because of political inaction and interference that has helped breed the very crimetopia we all live in today. Few, if any of them, had the platform and influence to change that she does.

Yes, she was never the police minister, but she sat in Cabinet meetings, had a voice, and had an influence on government for years. The government she was part of and helped shape did not do enough.

She cannot now ask people to give it another chance when she herself has been a victim of that government’s failures.

I hope she gets her wish and goes home to find peace, believing that she can leave the rest of us common people to deal with the “terrorists of Tshwane”.

But she can’t be ignorant enough to believe that the legacy of her party’s fiascos won’t follow her.