At a recent Instagram Live event, Chris Stofberg, MD of Modern Hair and Beauty, made the following comment. It was well received and he sent it to Hairnews as an opinion piece, to share with a wider audience.
The below piece represents the personal opinion of Chris Stofberg.
We would love to hear your comments and feedback on Chris’s thoughts – please email info@hairnews.co.za with your input.
Good evening everyone.
I think it would not be proper of me tonight, to not say something about what has happened to our country over the past week, and my thoughts about where to now. Like all of you, I’m a citizen of this country, a tax payer, a business owner, a family man, and I wonder about our future here. Is there hope for this country? Is there anything we can do to change what is happening? Not many of us can leave, or want to leave. This our country. We live here and we want to stay. The way I see it our future ultimately lies in our hands, us, all the people of this country, both the have’s and the have not’s, because all of our votes count the same. The problem up to now has been how that vote has been used, or not been used. But I will come back to that.
To everyone in Natal and in Gauteng who have been affected by this looting, my heart goes out to you. I cannot imagine the trauma some of you must have gone through. We have been in touch with our team in Durban. Pramantha, Ashnee, Sybil, Carla. They each have stories to tell and will probably have many nightmares reliving their experiences. I’ve also spoken to some of our clients. Craik Spiers in Pietermaritzburg has had to marshal shopkeepers in his area to stand together and prevent looting and damage to property. I’m sure there are many other similar stories. At this stage the most desperate need is for food. I’m sure you’ve all seen the queues on social media. At least those in the queues have money for food. There will be many people, particularly among our operators, and also people in the community where our team members live, who don’t have any income at the moment. We have made some funds available to our team to support those who are in need with food parcels. We will also do what we can to support any of our clients whose salons may have been looted or damaged, once they’ve had a chance to assess this.
The sad and ironic reality is that this trauma is being experienced not just by those on the receiving end but also by many of those who were caught up in this frenzy, and ended up destroying their own livelihood.
I’ve had this fear for some time, of the desperate unemployed masses, increasing by the day, one day simply saying they’ve had enough, and rise up and revolt. Not about service delivery, which we’ve seen already, but for food and other basic necessities they don’t have. Exactly how they would do this I haven’t really thought about, but I think we’ve just seen it. The spark that ignited it was a well-orchestrated mass mobilisation by Zuma loyalists, who are just as crooked as him, and are seeing the writing on the wall for him. They are well aware that they may soon follow. The state security agencies are telling us they know who they are and that they’re being arrested. I hope that is true and I hope that they do arrest and bring these criminals to book. They should be charged with treason and terrorism, and be locked up for the rest of their lives.
The reason we got to this point is no secret. The ANC under Jacob Zuma have run this country into the ground, spending their time stealing resources and fighting internal factional battles, and ruining state institutions either through sheer incompetence, or by intention, so that they cannot prosecute the corrupt politicians running this country. We know the only way this country is going to survive, is by putting a clean competent government in place.
And for this to happen, the ANC needs to rid itself of its corrupt elements which may in fact happen a lot quicker after last week’s chaos, or they need to split, which is also a real possibility now. But even if the ANC does clean up its act, which is not going to happen overnight, I still don’t believe they will be putting enough competent people in important leadership positions, because they will still be appointing people based on patronage. We need a lot of new blood in government which will only come from a coalition government. I don’t think a single political party is going to get enough votes in future to govern outright. And this is where the rubber meets the road. That coalition is going to depend very much on who the voters disillusioned with the ANC, and the newly registered voters vote for!
In 1994, during our first democratic elections, 89% of eligible voters voted! And in 2019? Only 49%! Voting has declined because people have lost faith in the political system. Many traditional ANC voters don’t believe the ANC has their interest at heart, but they are too afraid to vote for another party, and simply stopped voting. We also have millions more among the youth who need to register to vote.
In my opinion two things need to happen. Voter education is necessary so that more people are taught how the democratic system is supposed to be used by voters. That will however take a long time to get right. Secondly, voters need to believe that the solution to our countries problems lie in economic growth and a society living in harmony, not racial tension. I see future voters becoming more polarised. They’re either going to follow the radical, divisive, anti-white monopoly capital narrative of the RET grouping which is now basically made up of the EFF and the Zuma/Magashule camp, or they will see hope in an inclusive society where we all live together in harmony, which is in line with Herman Mashaba’s Action SA and the DA’s policy directives. Of course there are other parties as well, but I see these two as making up the bulk of the future “opposition” parties in our country. Our future is going to be determined by which of these groupings will attract the most support. It is my firm belief that by far most people in this country don’t subscribe to hate politics, but the problem is that when people are desperate and don’t see a way out of that desperation, they will believe the populist nonsense and lies that are promised by corrupt politicians.
That is why it is important that an alternative to the hate politics is highly visible and is experienced by as many people as possible. Voters’ choices will be determined by their own experiences and by their interactions with others. And this is where it is necessary for those who have the ability and the means to persuade, to build bridges and to generate goodwill among all sectors of society, to take some kind of action.
Each one of us interacts with people from all sectors of society on a daily basis, and many of us are in positions where we can make a difference in our local communities, or the communities around us. It takes nothing to be civil to each other, and to set that example. There are already many such examples of people coming together during clean-up operations after the recent chaos. There are many groups and civil society organisations that one can join, or one can start up something in one’s own community. I do believe in the people of this country, but I think more of us need to become involved for there to a massive groundswell which cannot be ignored by the marginalised, who currently have no interest in voting, or who think they will get a piece of land for free if they vote for the EFF.
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