AS the country moves closer towards, August 3, when the local elections will be held, issues of bread and butter naturally have taken centre stage. This is the time when voters are asking themselves whether the people they entrusted to lead them and those that they will entrust to lead them in the future are indeed the right choices.
However, unfortunately these elections also come at a time when unemployment, which also bring up the issue of “Opportunity” come to mind.
Readers going through the newspaper, will read or might have read deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa’s comments about how non South African citizens, and by his own observation, how the Somalis and Ethiopians have managed to make it, in what we a Gauteng Guardian have called the “Lonely road to entrepreneurship”.(see page 10)
Ramaphosa is quoted as saying that while acknowledging that the country is facing challenges with rising unemployment, price increases etc, South Africa still is the land of opportunity.
Ramaphosa chides South Africans, particularly the youth for not fully taking advantage of these opportunities, despite free access to finance and preference when getting tenders.
He also accuses the youth of being impatient, giving himself as an example of someone who had to take a few knocks in life making.
This somehow reminds me of the saying (loosely paraphrased) ‘ You don’t know what you have got, until you go without it to understand and fully appreciate something.
Many people still make the long trek to Mzansi, ‘ The street of gold’ being Johannesburg because they appreciate and see what this country has to over. We have on page 3, a Nigerian man , who rose from being a sweet and cigarettes vendor, to being a millionaire. I know for some, especially the young and impatient it may seem like a case of “easier said than done” kind of thing, but this country still has opportunity and is ripe for the taking, for those who want.
And there are even those coming from first world countries, who see opportunity in this country. Therefore I would urge each and every one of us to take Ramaphosa’s words seriously and strike while the iron is still hot. Yes there may be problems, but that is true of anything in life, but lets not do us the dis service and not take advantage of what we have in our own backyards. – patience.rusere@gautengguardian.co.za

Last week, deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa, at the Shanduka