FIKILE-NTSIKELELO MOYA | Voters can't point fingers at political bad guy they chose

One of my favourite movie scenes is from the gangster flick Scarface. Al Pacino plays the role of Tony Montana, a notorious drug lord who has made peace with his soul belonging to the devil.

Montana finds himself hopelessly drunk in an upper class restaurant and consequently making a spectacle of himself.

He turns the table on those ogling him. “You need people like me so that you can point your fingers and say there goes the bad guy. What does it make you, good? You are not good. Me, I always tell the truth, even when I lie,” he says as he staggers out of the restaurant surrounded by a bevy of bodyguards.

By so saying, Montana calls out the hypocrisy of his society. Unlike them he knows he is lying and does not pretend to be an honest man or have the best interest of the people at heart.

Many South Africans look to politicians like the restaurant crowd in Scarface. We do not elect politicians to be partners and champions of whatever programme we believe needs attention.

We go to the polling stations just so we can blame someone for the role we abandon in making our communities functional.

There are many examples of this but I will limit myself to two stories published in Sowetan in the past few weeks.

The first was of an Evaton community in the Vaal, south of Gauteng. According to the story there is a pothole there so big that local children sometimes use it as a swimming pool. The pothole has been around for many months and the recent story was not the first to report about it.

It should go without saying that this is a governance failure. It is however also a failure by the local community.

They have failed to make their local government account and by either returning the same party or ward councillors to lead local government, they have also failed to use their electoral muscle properly.

They have also failed their own children. It is only a matter of time that one of their children, or even a grown up, drowns or is hurt by the presence of such an eyesore.

There is no good reason why that community is not coming together to fill the pothole.

They are waiting for a government that has proven itself unresponsive to do what it has failed to do for months.

The people of that Evaton community are comfortable in the government existing just so that they too can point a finger and say: there goes the bad guy.

They think that the presence of politicians makes them feel better with their own inaction. They already have someone to blame when the inevitable tragedy happens. They have their bad guy and it makes them feel better with themselves.

Another similar story is that of Ditsobotla, Lichtenburg in the North West.

According to a story in this publication, one resident lamented that he had to send his children to their mother’s home on the other side of the village because of a stench coming from a rubbish dump and stagnant water almost at his doorstep.

As with Evaton, this is a service delivery failure. The man in the Sowetan story says they have repeatedly voted for the ANC without any improvement in services.

The mayor of the district municipality in charge admitted that local councillors tended to see themselves as above the community they represented and spend time fighting among themselves for the right to dispense patronage.

Evaton in Emfuleni municipality and Ditsobotla in North West have the same problem. They hope to outsource the responsibility for the standard and quality of their lives on people who are yet to have the honesty of admitting that they always “tell the truth even when they lie”.

The two communities are not unique in this regard. Far too many communities have abandoned local activism and handed over the responsibility for the quality of community life to politicians and to the state.

The once vibrant community projects sector, where locals got together to find local solutions to their problems because they had no expectations that the government will, has all but died.

The refrain has become: what is government doing for us?

To them democracy provides an opportunity of pointing a finger and saying there goes the bad guy without ever questioning their own role in choosing the bad guy.