ike I’ve said a number of times before, life in Africa is tough!

It is an incredible place to live but it doesn’t come easy. Shit just goes wrong, we’re a developing nation and we get it, it’ll take time to get right and in the meantime just enjoy the best quality life in the world (cause relative to any other major city in the world LIFE IS CHEAP HERE!)  and try not to get shot!

The point is there are few days in our lives when you wake up in the morning and the weight of a difficult country doesn’t weigh heavy on your shoulders. In fact in my lifetime I can think of only a few. Rugby World Cup Final days (there have been two of them so far), Soccer world Cup (almost every day for a month) and finally VOTING DAY (of which I’ve been part of 3)

These are days when all the shit that normally gets us down somehow manages to disappear and everyone stands together to be a part of a challenged changing nation and for some reason we don’t care that we have to stand in a queue for hours, or that it takes 20 minutes to find my name on the voters role, or that people can actually walk past and see who I’m voting for – we all are in it together for once and it is the greatest patriotic sensation!

But this Election Day did raise a number of questions for me as the ANC very expectedly come out miles ahead . . .

My question is, if you knew someone who went to a specific supermarket for 20 years, time after time, to buy cereal because they were promised a toy in the cereal box. But every time they got home and opened the box there was no toy! They had heard other people got toys, they had heard promises of new and better toys each time they went to the shop but alas each box they opened with hope and expectation they found no toy! Yet for 20 years they went back to the same place to buy the same box of cereal and EVERYTIME EXPECT A DIFFERENT OUTCOME!

If you knew a person like this you would quite blatantly say they were AN IDIOT, no?

Now I know politics is not quite that simple but the principle remains the same and the scary thing is for whatever reason the bulk of our country continually votes and gets non delivery! They complain about it sure, theyre unhappy about it always BUT THEY STILL BUY THE SAME BOX OF CEREAL AND EXPECT THE TOY THEY’VE BEEN PROMISED!

Now I know in this instance there are a number of mitigating factors but what REALLY concerns me as a young South African is that I think our country may be too dumb to succeed?

If every time we get the chance to make a change and demand more, we don’t. Every time we question our leaders and are dissatisfied with what they have given us we put them right back in the fat seats, and this seriously concerns me because it means we as a nation are too stupid to realize that the people we are voting for are not serving the country well enough!

I leave this to you to discuss because this is a rather sensitive subject but please, when we are next given the privilege to vote, use it to buy something that actually shows you the toy they are going to give rather than describing it in vivid detail only to break your heart AGAIN!

Well done to those of you who made your mark – enjoy the dirty smudge on your thumb for the next week!