Just a week into SA’s Covid-19 lockdown, and there are already troubling signs that the state may be unwittingly creating the circumstances for social upheaval — driven, not by the lockdown itself, but by law enforcement’s often violent attempts to implement it.
Now, a far-reaching court application by Fair and Equitable Society, an NGO, aimed at reinforcing the principle that ordinary people continue to have constitutional rights during the shutdown, will force the state to take a legal position on alleged widespread human rights abuses by police and defence force members.
The government is arguably doing the best it can to prevent Covid-19 from collapsing the state’s already fragile public health system and potentially claiming the lives of millions of people living with HIV, uncontrolled diabetes and compromised immune systems.
But the hardline approach adopted by certain members of the police and defence force in enforcing shutdown regulations — and their leadership’s apparent refusal to condemn the multiple acts of violence and abuse flooding social media — should be troubling anyone with any awareness of SA’s desperate social and economic situation.
This is the most unequal country in the world, where more than half of the citizens live in poverty. In this context, law enforcement needs to be doing the best it can to mitigate the devastating social impact of the shutdown on the poorest of the poor.
The Black Sash has already appealed to the government to focus its disaster relief efforts on providing food parcels to poverty-stricken communities, who have no ability to access informal employment during the shutdown.
Addressing hunger-driven desperation and need during the shutdown needs to be one of the state’s most urgent priorities. Instead, the images and videos that have dominated Twitter timelines and television screens have captured law enforcement officials engaging in behaviour that, at best, amounts to bullying and humiliation and, at worst, brutality.
Fair and Equitable Society legal director Samantha Sarjoo describes some of these videos in an affidavit before the high court in Pretoria, detailing how they capture police and army officials forcing members of the public “to do frog jump for long distances in full view of other people”; hitting people “with fists, sjamboks inside their yards”; shooting them with rubber bullets; kicking and forcing people “to go inside their homes from their yards”; and “roll on the floor in full view of other people”.
Sarjoo added that the police allegedly shot and killed a man who was buying alcohol from a tavern in contravention of the shutdown regulations.
Police watchdog the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (Ipid) is investigating cases of alleged police criminality during the shutdown. While these investigations continue, law enforcement bosses have shown a disturbing lack of concern over reported police and defence force abuses.
When police minister Bheki Cele was asked about police using excessive force during the first day of the shutdown, he responded: “Wait until you see more force.”
Cele has subsequently urged police to show compassion to the public, but his off-the-cuff remark was a telling one. SA’s police face billions of rand in legal claims for damages, unwarranted shootings and torture, and Ipid records hundreds of deaths at the hands of the police every year.
It is crucial, now more than ever, that this apparent culture of abuse and impunity changes. In the context of the devastating global and local economic Covid-19 crisis, SA’s majority — its poor — are going to be driven into desperation.
Law enforcement can either calm this desperation, or it can perpetuate the abuse of people who have nothing left to lose, and reap the whirlwind.
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