1. We do not know how lucky we are to have lived under DA govt for so long in the WCape. I have just spent three days campaigning in Ditsobotla (Lichtenburg, Itsoseng and Coligny). Stage 6 load-shedding pales into insignificance compared with the Water-shedding.
2. Some communities have no water at all for weeks on end. This is a result of a combination of factors -- cable theft, infrastructure destruction, broken pumps, and of course, absence of electricity to pump water even when the pumps are working.
3. Even when the water system works, various cadres with contracts to deliver water through water tankers, allegedly sabotage the system, to continue being paid for water deliveries.
When the water does not work, nor does the sewage. When the pumps don't work, sewage spills.
4. You can smell some places before you see them. And when you get there you immediately see where the cadres live -- in grand houses compared to many of the surrounding hovels.
Roads are so pot-holed, it is almost impossible to drive on some of them.
5. When Pres Ramaphosa visited recently, they actually chopped up some tarred roads, and turned them back into gravel roads, because it had become impossible to drive through the pot-hole pocked roads that were once good tarred roads.
6. The ANC in Ditsobotla is still in a vicious battle last spoils of office, the tenders and jobs, while the residents suffer. A once large and flourishing hospital is now an empty shell. Other infrastructure lies stripped as if an marauding army has passed through.
Helen Zille
7. The ANC will be pushed below 50% in next week's election for the first time. But it is incomprehensible that, in those conditions, anyone at all will vote for them. People really shape their own destiny through their vote.
8. I hope the people of Ditsobotla and other towns will not wait till all their infrastructure is in ruins, till there is no more piped water, sewage or electricity at all, let alone functional clinics, working schools and passable roads.
9. I came the closest I have ever been to seeing what a failed state means to ordinary people, especially the poor. Time for all South Africans to wake up and vote for the only party that can establish an alternative, that governs well. In a democracy the choice is theirs.
Source: www.twitter.com/helenzille
