MERAFONG IN CRISIS: Independent Candidate Tshepo Motloi calls for non-partisan leadership to rebuild municipality

Independent candidate Tshepo Motloi says Merafong City is in a dire state, and that the crisis goes far deeper than service delivery failures.

Speaking to KHETHA KHONA (Mapepeza), Motloi said the municipality is facing a greater catastrophe: the divided family structure.

“It is only natural law that a child should be raised by both maternal and paternal parents and once that gets distorted the society faces a devastating crisis,” Motloi said.

He argued that offspring raised in single-parent homes in most cases carry unidentified psychological trauma throughout their existence. This, he said, leads to low self-esteem, causing many children to seek validation from the streets, which in turn creates an unbalanced society.

“They do not know their capabilities. In an event that they know them they lack the belief to see them through,” he said.

Motloi said this cycle leads to men who do not know how to handle a family and raise children, and contributes to alcoholism arising from unfulfilled ambitions. He called for government policies to be focused on redressing policies that perpetuate this catastrophe.

He further accused the state of creating a state dependency syndrome that has been manufactured intentionally, pointing to the offering of Reconstruction and Development Programmes to citizens who are not active in the country’s economy.

“Our citizens lack employment. Our citizens lack skills due to the closing down of technicons by the current governing party. Our young generation have no skills as they were promised prosperity upon a minimum Grade 12 qualification only to find the opposite,” Motloi said.

He said the result is a generation with only institutional education and theoretical knowledge, with no practical, portable skills, making self-employment highly difficult even for those who want it.

On top of this, Motloi said bourgeois politicians have molested the coffers of the municipality and have taken it upon themselves to rape state institutions.

“There is absolutely nothing that is working, from the road infrastructure, water and electricity, sewerage, social rehabilitation programmes, recreational programmes, funding for small medium enterprises. Local economy has been taken over, mines shutting even though there is enough ore underground, investors leaving our municipality,” he said.

Motloi said what Merafong needs is leadership with the will to rehabilitate the municipality, and that only a person who is non-aligned to a political party will be able to do that.