Exposé
The change is in you Noluvuyo Bacela
Placing a square peg into a square hole seems like a rather easy task to do now that we are older, especially when you are watching a two year old frantically shove the poor object into the opening. We look into why young South Africa prefers to be spoon-fed information as opposed to going out to look for it.
48 IMBO/ ISSUE 9/ 2012
L
ike they say in the Good Books too many options confuse the mind and having to sort between the round, square-like and triangular objects can be quite daunting if your mind hasn’t been fully developed for the task. What we hardly consider is that according to scientists it’s not particularity about how fast your mind connects the dots but how you manage to soldier on through the frustration of figuring the puzzle out. While taking a break from trying to figure things out may seem like a good idea to some – forcing matters appears to be the ideal thing to do for most of us. Take the staggering number of prospective students queuing outside the administration offices at the beginning of every year, for instance. This number contributes a significant amount to the rate of university drop outs and graduate unemployment that we are obviously oblivious to since the only statics we are concerned with are the Census and maybe the crime stats. But like clockwork, late applications flood education institutions almost as though people didn’t know they had the access to this system throughout their Matric year- granted they may have been anxious about the results but still it’s inexcusable.
One of the most admirable things about South Africans is their ability to throw caution to the wind and trust the “system”. Our gullibility to trust our politicians is truly admirable, forgetting to remember that politicians are not too far off from lawyers. Remember that time when former President Thabo Mbeki said “HIV doesn’t cause Aids” or just recently when the government said our first democratic President Mr Mandela was in Pretoria’s 1 Military Hospital but turned out to actually be at “an undisclosed location.” The newspaper headlines could be made bolder and live talk shows could invite political leaders, and open the phone lines, to give the general public a platform to state their views. But because we are so used to our leadership occasionally showing us the middle finger chances are we won’t say much to their faces. Our foible minds have been, over the years, corrupted into carelessly believing that an extra term (or three) regardless of their actions towards the public- will bring change.