Reverend Barney Pityana has told South Africans to take responsibility for the country’s failures because they elected leaders without vision and basic competence, reported theDispatch Online.
“We must blame nobody but ourselves for the tragedy of our education system, a collapsing healthcare system, a bloated but inefficient civil service, pervasive crime and corruption that has become endemic,” Pityana said. “That is because we have elected a government without any intelligence collectively to understand what must be done. We have a government trapped in ideological blinkers, that believes and behaves like it is unaccountable.” Pityana was speaking in Grahamstown yesterday at Kingswood College’s annual memorial lecture to celebrate the life of anti-apartheid activist Neil Aggett. He said many of the country’s shortcomings could not be blamed on its evil apartheid past. If South Africans continued to endorse the country’s failed leadership, the result would be “continued chaos, extending inequality, burgeoning unemployment, poverty and the social evils that have become characteristic of much of our society”. He said the ANC and its allies treated with suspicion and hostility any ideas that did not reinforce their own “stereotypical reality” and sought to silence the likes of The Spear artist Brett Murray, cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro (Zapiro) and expelled ANC Youth League president Julius Malema. Pityana is a former vice-chancellor of the University of South Africa and chairman of the SA Human Rights Commission, and is now rector of the College of the Transfiguration in Grahamstown.
