Violence a relic from people’s war to make SA ungovernable

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

President Jacob Verwoerd's lame excuses for textbook scandal

It is not difficult to deliver a schoolbook to a child who wants one. President Jacob Zuma’s lame excuses are, sadly as we say, merely typical of an administration that has in all respects lost its way.

HOW sad it was to hear President Jacob Zuma , in an interview with Radio 702 host Redi Thlabi, insist that the Limpopo textbook scandal is the fault of the architect of apartheid, Hendrik Verwoerd.

As if it were Verwoerd, not Zuma’s educational trust, who took money from Edusolutions in return for contracts to distribute school textbooks. As if it were Verwoerd, not Zuma’s administration, who dumped textbooks in a river, not once but at least twice, instead of delivering them to the African children waiting for them.

It was Verwoerd, not Zuma’s lax controls, who caused municipalities to misspend R11bn last year and Verwoerd, not Zuma’s allies in the Free State, who promised to cover exposed toilets in the province last year and still have not.

It is Verwoerd who drives a truckload of helpless passengers into the face of an oncoming train, killing all of them, and it is Verwoerd who dreams restlessly of the poor while he contemplates the purchase of a billion-rand personal jetliner.

Of course, we know what Mr Zuma means. Apartheid did great damage. But that does not mean we should be impressed with Mr Zuma now. The job, we thought, of a democratic government in South Africa was to improve on the ills of apartheid, not to embed them.

In the course of an hour-long interview with an excellent Ms Thlabi, the head of state did not once take responsibility for a single problem the country faces — not corruption, not crime, not the lack of education. In his own mind he is fixing all of these things, not making them worse.

Faced with myopia on this grand scale, ordinary South Africans have little choice but to put their heads down and do whatever job is at hand to the best of their ability, hoping our current political ordeal passes. It is probably too late, though, for this generation of schoolchildren in at least Limpopo and the Eastern Cape. They are largely lost.

The only people who could do more than the rest of us will be the delegates at the ANC’s leadership contest in Mangaung in December. They will be asked directly whether they want Verwoerd to continue running the country or to relieve Mr Zuma of the burdens of high office. The choice, to us, is easy.

It is not difficult to deliver a schoolbook to a child who wants one. Mr Zuma’s lame excuses are, sadly as we say, merely typical of an administration that has in all respects lost its way.

Source: Business Day

PUBLIC SERVICE ACT (PROCLOMATION 103 OF 1994)

The purpose of the Public Service Act is to provide for the organisation and administration of the public service of the Republic, the regulation of the conditions of employment, terms of office, discipline, retirement and discharge of members of the public service, and matters connected therewith.

Source: SABINET