The thing about Cabinet Ministers….
I never thought I’d say this about myself, but I have a problem of double standards. As I think about it, I’m suspicious of people who don’t have a similar problem when it comes to most social and political issues.
Now I’m no politician and I’m no social scientists. In fact I’m still struggling with the final two subject the will make me a qualified social scientist. For now I’m just a lay person. I will therefore refuse to be held responsible for my uneducated ,anti-social and counter-revolutionary opinions.
So why is it that our Cabinet ministers are expected to live like us, lay citizens? Why is it that we had no problems voting them in, but we have very serious issues with them going on serious shopping sprees with our money. Why is it that our Ministers really like big cars with all the features that they’ll probably never use. I think that maybe they feel entitled to some of these things because well, they fought hard for it. I was not there, but the adults in my family were. I can imagine the entire nation was sitting around watching while the current ministers were marching and getting shot at in the streets. No one ever took part in these things because they probably never had the time, they were too content with their current situation. Everyone must should leave them alone seeing that they went out of their way to make life more bearable for us. We repay them by being ungrateful and complaining each time they make a small purchase and give tenders and employment opportunities to their friends and relatives. And we are just enjoying the fruits of their hard work, we languish in our state-of-the-art shacks and luxurious pit toilets. Even Comrade Blade, the eternal communist, managed to get himself a great big car, nothing wrong with that, but ain’t he supposed to be different.
I can’t help but wonder again, because they have top jobs and like in any other large organisation the top brass are entitled to credit cards and car allowances, maybe they deserve it too. But I ask myself again, the state is not really an organisation, it’s a state.
George Orwell got it right a long time ago. and his message is as relevant today as it was when he wrote Animal Farm. The apartheid government built low cost housing for the black people and provided them with the basics of everything. The state officials and their friends (I’m assuming it’s all the other white people) were living large. Big houses with tennis courts and Olympic sized swimming pools and big cars. Although we have rights and political freedom and access to “better” education and health care, we have social grants and all of those hand outs from government, is life really all that better? For all?
The things that the Ministers are supposed to have fought for are now in place, is it not time that we now try to sustain it and properly administer everything by handing the governing over to people who have the relevant know how. But clearly such a travesty will never occur, not in this generation anyway.
But what can we ever say, after all “all animals are equal, some are just more equal than others”…
