NUMEROUS types of chickens are coming home to roost in South Africa.
During their long campaign to win power by making the country
ungovernable via a no-holds-barred "people’s war", the ruling alliance
made up of the African National Congress (ANC), the South African
Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu),
injected into the bloodstream of the body politic a virus of violence
that they cannot now eradicate.
Whether to enforce strikes or bus
or school boycotts, protest against "service delivery" failures, back
some or other demand on campus, or complain against trains that are
late, violence in South Africa has become routine, not unusual.
Nonstrikers are murdered (60 of them in the security guards strike in
2006), city centres or university buildings trashed, roads blockaded or
railway coaches set alight. People from other parts of Africa who
undercut local traders are threatened or even murdered in so-called
xenophobic violence.
It is a tragic and bitter irony that all this
is happening in a country that is second to none in constitutionally
guaranteed and judicially protected democratic rights. The bitterest
irony of all is how the virus of violence has corrupted parts of the
trade union movement. During apartheid, when union officials were banned
or detained without trial, and black unions frequently barred from
factories by hostile employers, the emerging black union movement won
its legal rights by a struggle that was essentially nonviolent.
Now,
with a privileged position, plus organisational and strike rights that
are also second to none around the world, unions have become
increasingly intolerant, as the Democratic Alliance experienced during
its recent march on Cosatu House.
Killing people in the context of
inter-union rivalry at Lonmin is also a manifestation of a principle
that the ruling alliance introduced during its people’s war, which was
to eliminate rival political organisations as far as possible. One of
the chickens that is now coming home to roost is that some of the rival
factions within the ANC are now using violence — possibly even
assassinations — against one another.
Another of the chickens is
the poor quality of the police. Their behaviour at Lonmin is but the
most lethal manifestation of a wider lack of professional skill,
including frequent inability to master the basics of crime scene
investigation.
Any intelligent leadership in the police force
would have long ago foreseen the risks arising from our violent
political culture. Proper training and equipment would long since have
been provided to avoid precisely what happened at Lonmin. But, of
course, the ANC has ensured that there is no proper leadership at the
top of the police force. Instead, the police have become the plaything
of rival factions in the ruling party, not to mention the victims of
affirmative action and cadre deployment policies.
So South Africa
is in a catch-22. The people’s war was part of the strategy of the
national democratic revolution to make the country ungovernable.
Continued adherence to the strategy of the national democratic
revolution in the form of cadre deployment in particular results in a
police force that cannot handle the violence that continues as a
hangover from the people’s war.
One consequence of the ineptitude
of the police is their inability to handle situations such as that at
Lonmin without making things infinitely worse. Another is their
inability to put a stop to the violence that now characterises so many
demonstrations across the country. A third is their inability to secure
prosecutions and convictions of violent demonstrators.
Over all of
this presides a president out of his depth as CE of the state. His
ministers take unto themselves more and more power. Yet, apart from
collecting taxes, his government fails increasingly to get the very
basics right, top of which is providing law and order under the rule of
law. His fondness for singing about his machine gun while the whole
nation listens symbolises the very culture of violence that is helping
to ruin this country.
• Kane-Berman is CE of the South African Institute of Race Relations.
Source: Business Day
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