A Letter To The Government

Dear Government

You might have noticed that more and more people are getting poorer. Maybe you care, maybe you don't. Either way it is your problem. I know you have been trying to improve people's lives and for that I give you three brownie points for the effort. However I believe you haven't been trying hard enough. You have failed to recognise that not everyone wants a tender (although that seem to be the picture you are painting, not intentionally I hope). Not everyone wants a house in Sandton or a BMW. You'll be amazed that most people are happy to get by with a decent house and a job. You seem to be distributing a lot of tax-payers money but do you really know where is it going or you are just turning a blind eye.

I'm not writing this to highlight your problems, which are pretty obvious, but offer solutions. See, I love this country. I don't want it to get to a point where poor people decide to take up arms and demand what's theirs. I'm certain that's not want you want unless uyahlanya. So here are few of my solutions:

RDP Houses

Here is a scenario: You build houses for the poor but then they end up at the wrong owners. So what do you to stop this from happening. Recently it was reported that six out of ten matriculants won't find jobs. Perhaps you'd wanna use the matriculants from those areas to monitor and report if houses are allocated correctly. I doubt they'll be required to have a university degree to perform these tasks.

Education

You'll agree with me that the standard of education in this country has decreased. This, you'll agree with me again, is the result of poor prior preparation. Having realised this, I propose that you build speciality high schools all over the country. There should be a school that is strictly dedicated to science, another one to accounting, and so on. These schools should be designed to cater only for poor bright kids. In this way we prepare them for varsity and also avoid skill shortages in the future. You're probably thinking where the money for all of this is going to come from. I suppose if you have 17 million rands to entertain presidents and kings, another millions of rands to buy MPs cars, then it shouldn't be difficult to raise 3 million rands to build a school. I'm just saying.

Social Grants

Growing up in a township I have witnessed the abuse of social grants. Half the money doesn't even go to the intended recipients. It is used usually for alcohol consumption or other unnecessary things like KFC (Not saying that the poor kid shouldn't have KFC, it's just that there are more important things) . Here is my suggestion: How about you stop giving out cash. Is that it? No it's not it, at least not only it. A recipients gurdian or parent would need to declare the child's needs before they are given a grant. Design credit-card style cards that can be used at department stores for purchases instead of giving out cash. Make deals with departments stores where a child's material needs maybe fulfilled. This will also decrease corruption as people will now realise that there is no cash involved and therefore no temptation. Another thought: why don't you start taxing grants less than 1% and use the money for health care.


So these are my suggestions. Use them. Don't use them.