By Keith Bryer*
To make South Africa a better place in 2017 and beyond:
- Give our children an education free of prejudice and hate.
- Instil in our children the work ethic of Malawians and Zimbabweans.
- Praise all taxpayers as heroes.
- Hire only qualified people to deliver electricity, clean water, safe sewerage disposal, and rubbish removal.
- Stop thinking profit is sinful; it’s the strongest, most successful motive for improving life.
- Reward individual achievement, recognising its role in community progress.
- Stop hiring more local, provincial and state employees.
- Do not hire friends, relations, co-religionists, tribesmen, or people of your national, race or language group unless they are qualified to do the job.
- Give all public-housing tenants classes on mortgage finance, the rights, duties, and risks of property ownership, then give them full freehold rights to their homes.
- Re-write the school history curriculum to emphasise the positive contributions to the country of each of our 11 ethnic and language groups.
- Give full state bursaries including living expenses, to school leavers wanting to be plumbers, electricians, welders, carpenters, joiners, bricklayers and plasterers. Give them a full set of tools on qualifying.
- Do not give bursaries to students studying politics, sociology, or media studies.
- Reserve two seats on the boards of all public companies for worker representatives selected and voted for by the entire staff. Their seats to be held for two years.
- Close all sociology departments in universities, replacing them with departments of comparative history that concentrate on how under-development countries have successfully developed modern economies.
- Make constitutional study a compulsory subject for Matric.
- Clearly separate news reporting from opinion in all media.
- Forbid TV reporters to ask anyone on camera how they “feel”.
- To get an ID document all citizens must answer questions on the Constitution, the importance and function of maintenance and the source of all state expenditure.
- Ban advocacy groups masquerading as charities and claiming tax-free status.
*Keith Bryer trained as a secondary school teacher at Rhodes University where he graduated. He edited Grocott’s Mail for a year before getting a teaching post at Kingswood College before he left South Africa for Britain where he returned to journalism working as a shipping reporter before joining The Times Educational Supplement as a reporter. He rose to the position of News Editor in the next four years before returning to South Africa for the birth of his son and a job as leader and feature writer on the Eastern Province Herald. There he remained for four more years before joining BP’s newly-created public affairs division in Cape Town where he remained for the next 24 years except for two years spent on the Cape Times news desk before being lured back as a political analyst and internal communications specialist. On retirement in 2004 he briefly consulted on training executives on dealing with the media in a crisis and then returned to his first love operating as a freelance commentator.
