DA marks World Book Day

by Paul Willemburg MPL – DA Gauteng Spokesperson for Sports, Arts, Culture and Recreation (SACR)

Today, 23 April 2018, South Africa joins more than 100 countries cross the world in observing World Book Day.

This is the time to celebrate the work of our own diverse Mzansi authors, as well as acknowledging the need to cultivate a love of books and reading.

The commemoration of this day is important considering that as a country we are still facing a high rate of illiteracy and some of our secondary school learners can neither read nor write.

Books have the ability to educate, empower, equip, inspire and uplift the lives of our people.

Reading books helps our children to discover who they are and the career paths that they may want to pursue.

However, our children are being deprived of the opportunity to access books by the Gauteng ANC-led Administration which is failing to deliver libraries to our communities.

During the DA Gauteng Library Campaign last year, when we visited 28 libraries across the province, we discovered that the library books are outdated, there are internet challenges and some libraries are still not complete.

The Gauteng Department of Sports, Arts, Culture and Creation(SACR) is clearly failing in its mandate to deliver libraries to our people. It is the department’s responsibility to make it easy for all to access to books by delivering properly equipped libraries.

The DA firmly believes that libraries are a vital community resource to access information, internet services and to promote a culture of reading, writing and publishing books in all our local languages.

There is a need for Total Change in this Department and Gauteng residents, particularly for our children who can only thrive at school if they have access to books.