Go to rural areas to see problems experienced

AFTER representing Agang at the Rhodes University debate, I got to talking to some ANC supporters. I pointed out that failure of water infrastructure is a huge problem.

One who claimed to be from a deep rural area proceeded to lecture me about how the ANC gives the poor everything they need and they break it, and it's time people started taking responsibility. I would like her to go to tell that to people in numerous towns around the country where water infrastructure is crumbling, for reasons totally unrelated to what they do in their own homes.

I also spent the first few years of my life in a deep rural area on a farm with no running water and electricity. From that experience, I cannot presume to understand what conditions are like now in deep rural areas, which is why I go there to see for myself.

In many of our towns and villages, conditions are no better than in deep rural areas and I know that because I have been there.

If this ANC supporter would like to drop her arrogant DA-like attitude and visit an area with serious service delivery problems herself and see what it is like, I will willingly help her. I suggest she first disguises herself as a human being – I will even lend her an Agang T-shirt.

Philip Machanick, Agang Eastern Cape spokesperson and policy convenor, Grahamstown