National dialogue or national crisis? You choose

LET me begin again. We need a national dialogue. We need Helen Zille to be the DA leader inside the GNU.

- LORENZO DAVIDS

My comrade friends have castigated me for the latter. And about the former, I have heard media shows informing their listeners that South Africa doesn't need a national dialogue “because we know what people need.” If there has ever been an insight into the psyche of untransformed power in South Africa, these two moments are it.

Since the dawn of colonialism, those with power have always made it their business to make the misery of people the cost of doing business.

In 2021, ‘Unite 4 Mzanzi’ and Stellenbosch University’s Centre for Complex Systems in Transition estimated that South Africa lost about R1.5 trillion to corruption between 2014 and 2019. Others, such as Corruption Watch, report that we lost approximately R650 billion over the past 30 years since 1994.