Soweto’s old pupils are being asked to fund repairs the state has failed to make. Sandile Memela argues Siyazenzela turns self-reliance into an alibi, making poverty pay for the failures of power, and says the young must demand accountability instead.
By Sandile Memela
They call it Siyazenzela. We do it ourselves. It sounds like pride, but it works like abdication: a state that taxes you, fails you, and then invites you to fix its failures at your own expense. Before Soweto reaches for its wallet, it must ask who is really being let off the hook.
Batho Pele Convention – Siyazenzela
Invitation to ALL PEOPLE who attended Public Schools in Soweto for a meeting to form a permanent, independent and member-funded organisation to support the infrastructure maintenance of Soweto Primary and Secondary Schools.
Read it twice.
The government built no new ideology in 30 years. It failed to tap into Black Consciousness, which it wanted to smash and destroy.
Now, knowingly or not, new intellectual activists have coined a new slogan for abdication: Siyazenzela. We do it ourselves. This has echoes of former President Thabo Mbeki’s Vuku’Zenzele thinking.
1. The essence of this message is shallow self-reliance as state policy.
This is not community spirit. It completely condones and ignores the plight of black folk in achieving economic liberation. This is a clandestine agenda for the state, telling people who do not own the economy to pay twice for what they already paid for with taxes.
You pay tax. The state says it will provide free basic education, with infrastructure. The state fails to maintain the toilets, the roofs, the desks, the labs, the libraries that your children use.
Then the state, or its proxies, calls you – a former student, now a struggling worker, a nurse, a taxi driver, an unemployed graduate – and says: Come and form a member-funded organisation to fix your old school.
It is an ingenious trick. It privatises responsibility and socialises guilt. If you do not contribute, you do not love Soweto. If your old school collapses, it is because you, the alumnus, did not siyazenzela enough.
It expects the victims of a broken economy to fund the repair of the breakage, while those who control the budget, the tenders, the departments, move on to the next enrichment scheme.
Who is being asked to solve the problem?
The poster says “ALL PEOPLE who attended Public Schools in Soweto.” That is code for Black working-class and lower-middle-class people. People who do not own mines, banks, factories, or commercial property in Sandton. People whose wealth is a payslip that finishes on the 25th.
It does not invite Anglo American, which mined the land under Soweto. It does not invite the property developers who profit from Soweto’s expansion. It does not invite the Department of Education that has underspent and over-stolen for 30 years.
It invites YOU. Because you have nostalgia. Because you have guilt. Because you are easy to mobilise with the language of Batho Pele – People First – while Batho are put last in the budget.
The 1976 Generation Cannot Fix What it Broke.
This is the central impasse we must resolve honestly.
The 1976 generation was heroic. We will never take that away. They faced bullets to give us democracy without economic power. But heroism in 1976 does not guarantee competence in 1994-2026.
For over 30 years, that generation has been in government. They have been MECs, Ministers, Directors-General, mayors, councillors, union leaders turned tenderpreneurs. What has been the dominant legacy in Soweto schools? Not maintenance, but abandonment.
Pit toilets that kill children. Classrooms with 60 learners. Science labs without chemicals. Libraries without books. And in every province, a new scandal: school nutrition tenders, scholar transport tenders, building tenders.
They resolved to abandon their communities through self-enrichment schemes. They moved out of the township into previous whites-only suburbs. And their kids do not school in Soweto.
That is harsh, but look at the infrastructure. Infrastructure does not lie. If they cared, Soweto schools would look like former Model C schools. They do not.
So why do we keep expecting people who created the problem to solve the problem? Why do we keep inviting old, tired and exhausted 1976 activists, now turned millionaires in Dainfern and Steyn City, to come and “lead” the fix for schools their own children no longer attend?
Their time is up. Not as elders – we respect elders – but as managers of our future. They had their turn. They failed to institutionalise maintenance. They cannot now institutionalise volunteerism as a substitute.
What is the alternative?
The future belongs to the young.
This is where Dr Mbuyiseni Ndlozi and others like him should be clear. The task is not to mobilise former students to fund what the state must fund. The task is to mobilise the young to take their future into their own hands politically.
Do not ask Soweto to Siyazenzela the state’s job. Ask Soweto’s young to:
Demand accountability, not donations. Where is the infrastructure budget for Gauteng schools? How much was spent on maintenance vs. administration? Publish it at Regina Mundi.
Own the economy that must fund schools. Self-reliance without ownership of the economy is self-exploitation. If you do not own the economy, you cannot fund schools sustainably from membership fees.
Take political power to enforce Batho Pele for real. Batho Pele was never meant to mean “people, do it yourselves”. It meant “government, put people first.”
Let the convention on 10 October 2026 at Regina Mundi not be a stokvel for fixing broken windows. Let it be a convention where the youth tell the old guard: We will not pay for your corruption with our nostalgia.
If they want alumni support, let it be for excellence – bursaries, career guidance, sports – not for basic maintenance that the Constitution guarantees.
Otherwise, this well-meaning invitation is just another way of making poverty pay for the failures of power.