EDITOR’S NOTE
FOUR learners killed, others fighting for their lives in hospital, and a mom seriously injured while frantically trying to get to Hoërskool Driehoek after hearing of the walkway collapse.
On TV, images showed anguished parents desperately trying to locate their children, not knowing if they were also crushed by a slab of concrete that fell off the walkway at Vanderbijlpark school on Friday.
And how does a nincompoop called Lindsay Maasdorp from the Black First Land First (BLF) brigade react? He takes to Twitter to say the dead and maimed learners deserved what happened to them as they were being punished for being offspring of “land thieves”. How heartless can one be to utter such outrageous hogwash! Maasdorp was responding to a tweet by Siyanda Dizzy Gumede on Friday, who has since deleted his Twitter account.
Gumede said in the tweet: “Don’t have heart to feel pain for white kids. Minus 3 future problems.”
At the time, only three of the schoolchildren had been declared dead, with the fourth death announced on Sunday.
Maasdorp, in the same heartless vein, said: “Syanda Gumede is correct! God is responding. Why should we frown on the ancestors’ petitions to punish the land thieves including their offspring.”
What utter nonsense!
No one deserves to die in such a cruel manner. No child deserves to go to school a healthy young person only to leave in a body bag or on a stretcher, unconscious and paralysed.
Yesterday, the BLF moved to do some damage control, calling a media briefing, saying they wanted to “set the record straight”.
But if that was a ploy to appease those threatening to haul BLF leaders to the Equality Court and report them to the SA Human Rights Commission, then the media briefing did not achieve its goal.
What transpired was BLF leader Andile Mngxitama subjected journalists to contradictory statements on the matter: one minute he describing the Driehoek school incident as a tragedy, the next minute he was saying: “We as BLF want a new nation based on justice for all,” and then moving on to justify the shocking utterances made by saying there’s never any outrage when black children fall in toilets and die.
How can it suddenly be a tragedy when the BLF publicly celebrated the demise of children saying they deserved to die simply because they are of the same pigmentation with those who oppressed and subjected black people to years of abuse and injustice?
The BLF should take a leaf out of grieving dad Donovan Olckers’ book. Instead of being in a rage over losing his 17-year-old son Roydon in the tragedy, Olckers stood for unity and peace.
“Stop the hatred and bickering, just go out and make a difference,” wrote Olckers, a man who had every right to be angry over the tragedy and what was said by heartless people following his son’s death.
If the BLF really wants “a new nation based on justice for all”, they could start by displaying some humanity and showing compassion to the bereaved instead of shooting off their mouths.