The past week has held many lessons for us. One of them is the extent to which the private sector bails out our incapable state, every time.

I use the concept of "private sector" broadly. It includes the hundreds of neighbourhood watches and community groups that mobilised to fill the gaping hole left by our broken Police Service. It includes the taxi associations that formed shields around malls and other infrastructure because they understood the implications of destroying them.

It includes the major retailers, whose convoys, several kilometers long, left Gauteng under private security escort for KZN to ensure that people do not starve.

It includes the religious fraternity doing the same thing, at a smaller, local scale.

It includes the thousands of citizens who joined the clean-up brigades to help re-build what had been broken down.

Now consider this: it is the aim of the National Democratic Revolution to close down the space for the private sector, across the board, and put it under the control of the incapable state.

This ideology holds that the Party (read ANC) should control the State and the State should control society. Wherever this has happened, we have seen the State's functionality destroyed.

If this policy had already succeeded to the extent the ANC intends, every institution would have proved as incapable as our intelligence services, our police service and the army, all top-heavy in highly-paid officers, but pitifully poor in execution.

Think about this, as the ANC continues to drive the Firearms Amendment Bill, which seeks to disarm law-abiding citizens (even as corrupt elements in the police service and army sell firearms to criminal gangs across our country). Think about this when you ask yourself how a consignment of 1,000,000 rounds of ammunition could be looted under the noses of the SAPS guards in the Durban Harbour.

Think about the incapable state, as the ANC seeks to push through its amendment of Section 25 of the Constitution to give them the right to expropriate your property without compensation -- and then think of the many failed land reform projects through which the incapable State has destroyed once-productive farms.

Think of what has happened to Eskom, SAA, Denel, and every other once functional entity that has been destroyed through the official policy of cadre deployment.

And when you are thoroughly depressed about this, think of the private sector heroes that protected so much and are busy rebuilding and preventing starvation now.

There was only one place in the country where the institutions of the state worked hand-in-hand with the private sector and that was the Western Cape.

We have spent 15 years building a network of Neighbourhood Watch organisations, training them, accrediting them and equipping them to serve as appropriate "force multipliers" with the Metro Police, the SAPS, and private security companies, in a seamless functional system.

Last week showed how well all this worked.

And think about all this as registration weekend approaches.

Acknowledge that it is within the power of each one of us, working together, to remove the ANC's iron grip on the incapable state by voting them out.

You can only vote where you are registered. And the good news is that you can now register or change your registration to where you currently live, by going on-line. The website of the Independent Electoral Commission will guide you.

And then go out and vote on October 27 (assuming that the ANC does not find an excuse to "postpone" the election). If we all stand together in this election, as we did during the riots last week, we can bring the ANC below 50% in many places. And then it is game-on for our democracy.

If last week showed anything, it shows that we can solve any problems our corrupt and incapable government gives rise to. We need to take the final, logical step: at the ballot box.

Source: www.facebook.com/helenzille