When we elect our own people to represent us, people from our own communities who we know we can trust, we have a direct say in the way our councils are run.
Because they are our neighbours, sit next to us in church, and our children attend the same schools, our own people understand our fears, irritations and needs with greater clarity than any outsider ever could.
Developing the community isn’t just for our benefit but also for theirs, as members of the community. So there’s a direct bond of common purpose.
And it’s much easier to hold someone accountable when you keep bumping into them. There’s a personal relationship, compared to the detachment that switchboards, secretaries and missed calls can create.
The people we choose to represent us must be answerable to us, the community, first, and their political party, second. If our representatives go along with party decisions that are not in our interests then they are not representing us. This is not political theory; it is a key principle of the GOOD movement. We know there are good people in all of our communities. People with good values – young and old, women and men. We must elect them to represent us.
When people of that calibre are in the majority, in our councils and at other levels of government, we will say goodbye to corruption. We will say goodbye to third-rate service delivery. We will begin to say goodbye to gross inequality and poverty. I am very proud of the candidates who will represent GOOD in by-elections in George and Saldanha Bay over the next month or two.
They have proven track records of community service, and are people of the highest integrity. They are not the type to say “ja baas” while choking on their pride. Take Sucilla van Tura, for example. She couldn’t stomach her position as a token councillor of colour.
She didn’t know how to explain to her community in Vredenburg why they should live in the dirt while Langebaan looks like Camps Bay.
She felt so strongly about opposing baaskap in Western Cape politics that she took the massive risk of resigning her position as a councillor, giving up her only income, in order to stand for GOOD. Principle over position, and people over party, she says. If the price of opposing the majority party in the country is supporting a party of baasksap, then the price is too high. It’s a zero-sum game that’s got us nowhere.
That’s why we established GOOD.
Comments