EFF condemns the Department of Sports, Arts and Culture for wasteful expenditure on R22 million monument flag
11 May 2022
The EFF condemns the gross and wasteful intended expenditure by the Department of Sports, Arts and Culture, which has announced that it will spend R22 million to install a "monument flag".
In a clear exhibition of a Department that does not know what to do with its budget, Nathi Mthethwa and his colleagues have resolved to create a large scale project out of placing a stick into the ground and attaching a flag to it.
This is a useless, fruitless and misguided use of the taxpayers money, that must be rejected by all logical and rational people.
The explanation for this patently stupid waste of money, is that it will be a symbol of unity and national pride. The Department purports that this mounting of a flag, will inspire social cohesion.
Once again, the ruling party has a misguided understanding of what is necessary in South Africa to build social cohesion and inspire pride in the people of this country. A flag, will not resolve the deep-seated fractures in our society, which are rooted in the unequal distribution of wealth and abject poverty of African people.
Our people are unemployed, landless and victims of arrogant and unrepentant racism in the land of their birth. They are confronted by the statues of their conquerors on the streets of this country and are made to sing 'Die Stem', an anthem of genocidal maniacs, which desecrates the African prayer, Nkosi Sikelela i'Africa.
While he wastes money on putting a flag into the ground, right-wingers are in courts fighting to ban liberation songs and battling for a right to display the Apartheid flag all over this country. Racists are emboldened, and are completing a project of a takeover of all national assets, leaving a democratically elected state at the behest of the private sector.
There is no pride or unity that can be had in South Africa, because the humiliation of land dispossession and conquest has not been reversed, and Africans are shot and being told they are mistaken for monkeys and hippos.
Our people are subhuman. Sports legends such as Portia Modise tell painful stories of living in shacks while being called national heroes and Banyana Banyana are paid less for kicking the same soccer ball as their male counterparts.
Nathi Mthethwa has no appreciation of the role he is supposed to play in alleviating the plight of sports men and women, creatives, singers and actors, who have their properties repossessed frequently and die as paupers.
His monumental flag will mean nothing, because it is not underpinned by justice for African people, for the crimes of colonialism and Apartheid.
We call on Mthethwa to put the money he planned to use on his shameful flag-project to good use, and not insult our collective intelligence. The money can be used to develop local sports, invest in women's football or create long-lasting infrastructure for the creative industry, not this senseless attempt at social cohesion.
Issued by Sinawo Thambo, National Spokesperson, EFF, 11 May 2022
