Dear Mr Mayor,

Some three weeks ago you stood up in Council and vented your anger at the people responsible for the name change situation in Louis Trichardt. You vowed to fight against the ones who are “against transformation”. You even made a comparison between such people and birds that flew in from Europe.

It took some time for me to digest what you were on about. Transfor­mation is a complicated issue, because one person’s transformation is another’s racism. Some people fear transformation, while others use transformation as an ideology to instil fear.

This made me wonder what the fear or the anger is all about. Should we still, in the town as it is today, fear transformation?

I love numbers. In spite of what Mark Twain is supposed to have said (“lies, damned lies, and statistics”) I find solace in these statistical facts. It is also by looking at these realities that I start to wonder whether our elected leaders fear empty rooms, simply because they never bothered to open the doors.

According to the 2011 census data, the Makhado Municipality has just over 10 000 residents who classified themselves as “white”. That is less than 2% of the population in the municipality. If you look at the two wards that fall in the traditional Louis Trichardt town area, this figure drops to just below 7 400. Take into consideration that just over 50% of these are in the “economically active” age groups and you realise that the “threat” is even less impressive.

In the past 20 years, Louis Trichardt underwent a metamorphosis that is probably difficult to surpass in the rest of the country. For more than 10 years I lived in a house in town where all my neighbours were black. Their neighbours were also predominantly black, and if I may say so – I could not ask for better neighbours.

This brings me to the other reality – the ones making the biggest contribution to the town’s coffers are not the aforementioned 2%. Those who still believe that all services in town are being sponsored by the “white” residents need to get in touch with reality. It is simply a statistical impossibility. If you live in a house and two or three of your neighbours are not white, you make the lesser contribution.

During the last census, almost 30 000 households in the Makhado Municipality indicated that they have Internet access. Most of these (64,7%) were via cell phones, but the reality is that these households are in all probability making the biggest contribution via their taxes.

The argument that the country’s wealth is still centred among certain race groups might be valid, but given the figures in the municipali­ty, this becomes almost irrelevant. In the Makhado Municipality, 3688 households declared an annual income of more than R300 000 per year. Even if all the white households in town fall in this category (which is totally impossible), this will not represent two thirds of the households.

But the figures also tell another story. It tells a story of poverty, where only 26,3% of the population is employed, where more than 2 000 households in our municipality are headed by children below the age of 18 and where only 30% of the people have completed matric.
Why don’t we stop the racial biases? Why don’t we rather ask what the historical figure Louis Trichardt had contributed to society? Was he the Biblical “salt of the earth” or did he simply arrive in this beautiful part of the world to start wars and divide people? If he was not worthy of having a town named after him, then start the process again to have the town renamed.

Mr Mayor, you are in a position where you don’t have to fight a racial war. You can listen to history, as told by different groups, and base decisions on facts.

- Anton van Zyl