The mass acts of violence that occurred in parts of KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng from July 9-17 represented a nightmarish descent into hell comprising widespread looting, racial violence and vigilantism. What has now been euphemistically termed “the unrest” serves as a timely reminder for many of the tenuous thread by which order and civility are held.
In the aftermath of lawlessness and disorder what is required to avoid their repetition is not merely economic policy — as important as it may be — but, rather, a cultivation of the value and importance of personal responsibility. As explained by former US president Ronald Reagan: “We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the precept that each individual is accountable for their actions.”
Personal responsibility is defined by the Brookings Institution as the “willingness to both accept the importance of standards that society establishes for individual behaviour and to make strenuous personal efforts to live by those standards”. It also adds an aspect of accountability, explaining that it “also means that when individuals fail to meet expected standards they do not look around for some factor outside themselves to blame”, and concludes that “the demise of personal responsibility occurs when individuals blame their family, their peers, their economic circumstances, or their society for their own failure to meet those standards”.
Personal responsibility asserts that an individual’s agency in decisions is the primary driver and holds people accountable for those decisions. Unfortunately, the very notion of personal responsibility has become so foreign to South Africans that the spark of the recent unrest was former president Jacob Zuma facing consequences for actions and decisions he and his legal team made in his Constitutional Court contempt of court proceedings.
This may be best illustrated by the former president’s claim that his constitutional right to a fair trial, as guaranteed in section 35 of the constitution, had been infringed. This preposterous claim was made despite his prior refusal to engage in any form with the proceedings, irrespective of an unprecedented effort by the court to secure the litigant’s participation in proceedings. He opted to submit an inflammatory and emotive letter to the chief justice, rather than make formal pleadings in the proceedings.
The failure to inculcate a culture of personal responsibility has become ubiquitous in leadership. Not only will failures by the ministers leading the security cluster in the midst of the mayhem live long in the public psyche, but so will their subsequent finger pointing.
However, these failures are not limited to public sector leadership; they are also evident in the private sector. The tragedy of the former Steinhoff CEO is illuminating in this regard. His continued maintenance of innocence and unwillingness to account for his actions in spite of extensive investigative reporting to the contrary, ongoing as well as impending litigation, and having to resign from his post, most readily illustrate the point.
The most frightening revelation in this regard arising from the “unrest” is that the malaise of irresponsibility appears to have spread like a second pandemic among the populace. The explanations for the nihilism that underpinned the criminality focused on the inequality and injustice that is endemic to the SA economy. This explanation was best expressed by broadcaster Eusebius McKaiser, who wrote that “millions of black South Africans living under conditions of poverty do not have a stake in Nelson Mandela’s nominally free SA. They have no reason to be excited about waking up tomorrow. They have dim prospects of self-actualisation. They do not stand to lose reputations or careers if they are found guilty of public violence or theft, because you can only lose that which you have.” Finally, he pointed out that “finger wagging in the direction of the looters will not solve the problem”.
However, this explanation does not elucidate those who chose otherwise — the majority of poor communities around the country that chose to protect assets with their lives rather than participate in their destruction. If poverty inevitably leads one to the path of nihilistic destruction, surely the poorest provinces would have seen the worst of the unrest? The inconvenient truth is that the looters chose to partake in the violence. An example in this divergence was best captured by Newzroom Afrika in a captivating exchange between Nhlanhla Lux, a Soweto resident who assisted the police and army in protecting Maponya Mall, and a looter, Tumelo Dlamini. who had been captured.
Lux shouted the consequences of the looters’ actions to Dlamini, exclaiming: “You must be responsible. I’m not going to be emotional because you are crying ... Did you have a gun to your head? So why did you do wrong things? A tearful Dlamini was eventually moved to a confession and proclamation of his apology on live television, staring into the camera and pleading with looters to stop, sobbingly stating that “this thing we are doing is wrong guys, we are killing our parents”.
In the actions of Lux towards Dlamini lies our hope. In the tearful repentance and disavowal of the looter upon facing accountability lies our salvation. It is for this reason that I cannot support any proposal for amnesty or any effort to justify the looters’ actions. We cannot ignore the reality of SA, but by demanding from one another and cultivating a culture of personal responsibility we will begin to establish the essential conditions required to achieve the SA envisioned at our founding.
• Mhaga, a former secretary-general of Students for Law & Social Justice, is an attorney and member of the ANC Youth League.
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