DURBAN - A POET from the Mpophomeni Township in Howick has written a poem highlighting the failures of the ANC government that led to the party losing control of the uMngeni Local Municipality.
The DA claimed victory in the municipality in the local government elections. However, it is facing a battle to elect its leaders. A council meeting called last week to elect the new leadership collapsed amid irregularities.
The party is now taking the matter to court.
Poet Siyabonga Imbongi Mpungose posted the poem on his Facebook page, which was accompanied by a video.
The poem is in isiZulu and has attracted a lot of attention on Facebook with 798 comments by yesterday morning, 1300 shares and more than 8400 likes.
In the poem, Mpungose highlights a string of service delivery failures, as well as incompetence, dishonesty and neglect of the community as being the reasons behind the ruling party’s dismal showing in the municipality during the local government elections.
Speaking to The Mercury today, Mpungose said in the run-up to the elections, he had engaged with the youth in the area, and it was clear that the ANC could lose the municipality because of youth anger.
“I was engaging with the youth during campaigning, and they were disinterested in voting, unhappy about their current living conditions. It was clear that there was trouble ahead, and I decided to wait until after the elections to publish my poem,” he said.
He said the youth felt let down by the municipality because of the dearth of opportunities for the youth. This is a feeling he knows, as he had tried numerous times to get sponsorship from the municipality to promote his skills without success.
“When I started off as a poet, I would travel to a radio station in Durban to showcase my skills every Friday, it was not a paying job, so it was expensive. I asked for assistance from the municipality, and I never heard back from them. I was eventually sponsored by a local businessman,” he said.
He said he later learned that other municipalities sponsored talented youth from their areas to showcase their skills.
He said, in another incident, he was offered a chance to travel to perform overseas but needed to secure sponsorship to pay for his flight, but the municipality failed to respond to his request for assistance.
Mpungose makes reference to this in poem as one part, translated, says, “if you wrote to the municipality requesting things that could help develop the youth, they ( municipality) took your request and threw it in the rubbish bin, yet now they are pretending not to know why they lost the municipality.
“You know how they lost it,'' it says, “they lost it when they turned their back on the community and were preoccupied by how they must divide positions among themselves. They were preoccupied with tenders and had become arrogant.
“They lost it when individuals that we last saw in 2016 local government elections showed up again to ask us to vote for them again,” it says.
“uMngeni went (was lost) with the tourist, who stopped visiting Howick after seeing the denigration of the Howick Falls,” it says.
Mpungose told The Mercury that after publishing the poem, the outgoing leaders of uMngeni had started showing more interest in the community.
“But the community has realised it has the power to change things and has taken upon itself to develop itself outside of politics,” he said.
THE MERCURY