Ah, Chief Dwasaho! My leader, I recall your rare honour in 2021 from Abidjan’s Governor, His Excellency Robert Beugré Mambé of Côte d’Ivoire. You received the title of Chief Dwasaho, meaning “warrior”.
Yet you are not just any warrior: Mambé explained that this revered title is reserved for “a very wise and smart warrior” who has the courage of his convictions and upholds the values once lived and breathed by uTata Nelson Mandela.
Indeed, you were recognised for allegedly embodying the spirit of our global icon, the first democratically elected president of a free South Africa in 1994. His Struggle was rooted in the self-determination of “Africans in particular and black people in general”.
In your first (2018) State of the Nation Address (Sona), you invoked the solemn song of the late Bra Hugh Masekela, titled “Thuma Mina” (Send me). You stated that Masekela sang the tune anticipating “a day of renewal and new beginnings”. Thus, you committed yourself to standing with alcoholics, drug addicts, victims of gender-based violence, and others on the margins of society. You proclaimed without provocation that the country was on the brink of a “New Dawn”.
Magnum opus
Today, the date of 16 February 2018 is etched in the annals of history as the day you delivered your magnum opus, the “Thuma Mina speech”. It came two days after you forced uBaba ka Duduzane, an entrepreneur, although no one knows which sectors he (Duduzane) trades in or what services he offers, and his sister, the now “Commander” of the uMkhonto Wesizwe party, Duduzile (MP), to vacate office on Valentine’s Day. Who does that?
You nearly altered the course of history as the currency strengthened, the bond market celebrated, and business confidence soared. Even the people’s mood improved. This followed the disastrous “nine wasted years” of Jacob Zuma. The commentariat dubbed the moment Ramaphoria.
My leader, I hate being a bearer of bad news while you are fighting on all fronts, with the Helen Zille Infantry Battalion on the right and Uncle Sam’s mood swings on the left.
However, the truth is that you have squandered the goodwill of South Africans and wasted 2,618 days, approximately seven years and 63 days, on trivial matters and frivolities, such as the ANC renewal project. The current national Budget impasse is proof in the pudding that you’re neither a warrior nor a paragon of Mandela’s servant leadership values. You sold us a dud. The new dawn is clearly a false dawn.
Let’s start with the shambles at the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS), which in 2024 received an adverse audit opinion; the Auditor-General couldn’t make sense of its financial statements.
This chaos has long been in the making. Three years ago, it directly affected Nsiko, my niece. I took her under my wing because I believe in the power of education. I paid for her to repeat matric, and four years later, she walked into Eshowe Technical and Vocational Education and Training College like a newborn with a new wardrobe, smartphone, and guaranteed allowance.
She pursued a career in Farming Management, inspired by her late grandmother who tilled the soil until her last breath, but the barren homeland soil of Ulundi didn’t return the favour.
For two years, she never received NSFAS funding. We were sent from pillar to post. As a family of educated people, we tried every trick in the book, including writing to a deputy director-general at the Department of Higher Education and Training. The email was acknowledged and forwarded. Four years later, no reply.
My niece completed her theoretical training and struggled to find in-service training in her chosen field. It has now been a year and a half.
Once again, we activated contacts at home and abroad. No results. She joins a legion of young girls with no children but a wealth of potential, let down by a system designed to siphon taxpayers’ money to fund the lifestyle of the high and mighty.
Lack of in-service training
Due to the lack of in-service training, she cannot qualify for her diploma. Don’t mention the word Setas (sector education and training authority) because I’m likely to vomit. Too many Setas have “become mired in maladministration, opaque practices and outright incompetence”.
Nsiko’s dream is deferred, and “it stinks like rotten meat”, to borrow from Langston Hughes’s poem Harlem. She now works in retail. Did I mention that Nsiko’s father was murdered, and the Durban police did nothing?
Comrade Leadership, one of my editing apps insists weekly that my Achilles’ heel in British English is a “missing period”. Lo and behold, someone in my family missed their “period” for real. No app flagged the error, and no algorithm offered a correction.
I was perhaps 13 or 15 years old in high school when every English teacher made us write an essay on teenage pregnancy annually. It felt tiresome. Later, during my time at Basic Education, I confronted the grim statistics, the cold, unyielding figures: one in seven mothers in South Africa are teenagers as young as 12 to 15. About 365 adolescent girls give birth daily, yet not a single perpetrator is prosecuted for statutory rape.
The scourge of teenage pregnancy threatens to undo the developmental gains achieved for the girl-child in post-apartheid South Africa. More girls now finish high school; young women earn undergraduate degrees, consistently outperforming their male peers, yet more remain unemployed.
Yet I never imagined this cyclone of teenage pregnancy would strike the heart of the Mncube family. My tears have long since dried, spent in December when the devastating news broke that one of my late middle brother’s twins was pregnant.
Those tears I cannot uncry, nor can I erase the image of a 17-year-old girl-child, double orphaned and grandparent-less, now left to navigate the harsh terrain of motherhood alone.
Who impregnates a 17-year-old? Where was the much-vaunted Comprehensive Sexuality Education to save the girl-child from fate’s cruellest hand: raising a child while still a child herself?
Various states of intoxication
In December 2024, a group of men in various states of intoxication arrived at the Mncube household, ostensibly to take responsibility for the pregnant twin. They promised to return, to do right by the family, and to honour the tradition of paying damages for impregnating a flower yet to bloom. But promises made under the haze of alcohol often dissolve with the morning mist.
My leader, do you know that the twins’ father was murdered? He succumbed to his injuries a year after being brutally assaulted with the intent to cause grievous bodily harm by Isikebhe, a vigilante group recognised by the KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) Department of Community Safety and Liaison as a crime-fighting force.
Yet everyone knows these are bandits.
The Ulundi police closed the case without any investigation. In 2007, former KZN MEC for Transport, Community Safety and Liaison, Bheki Cele, ordered the group’s immediate dissolution due to its brutality against alleged suspects, often without any evidence.
A year later, my brother was found unconscious and foaming at the mouth. He was rushed to Nkonjeni Hospital, but they did nothing. He lay comatose in that death trap for many days despite my activating every contact I had.
The one twin who gave birth this week received only a school-leaving matric certificate in 2024; her sister failed and is now back in Grade 11, funded by her benevolent aunt. This is the beginning of the long winter of discontent.
Two years ago, my nephew was tortured and murdered, and his killers filmed the ordeal and sent it to many on his cellphone contact list. But the uMlazi police have done nothing.
Snapshot
My leader, I offer a snapshot of your government’s litany of failures in 1) education: 80% of Grade 3 pupils in our country cannot read for meaning; in 2) policing, 75 people are killed daily; and 3) a dysfunctional health system and social welfare (housing stats show informal settlements have risen from 3,583 in 2021/22 to 4,075 in 2024/25).
In 2023, I warned of a “false dawn”, boldly alerting the populace to “beware of a mirage”. As I do now, I concluded: “Your word, my leader, means little.”
Truly speaking, the Mncube households and most black people await the “New Dawn”, yet we always, like a trending tune,
style="font-weight: 400;">“Sohlangana Emathuneni”, congregate at the graveyard to bury one of our own.
Till next week, my man — send me nowhere, I quit. DM