GARETH VAN ONSELEN: Wake up, there is a war out there

Here are some facts from SA today, two decades into the establishment of a constitutional democracy:

• SA’s sitting president, Jacob Zuma, has now explicitly and publicly stated that he had survived an assassination attempt. He claimed this past weekend, "I was poisoned and almost died just because SA joined Brics," before explaining that he had survived three doses of a concoction designed to kill him.

• The Moerane commission of inquiry into political killings in KwaZulu-Natal is currently under way. Some witnesses are having to appear before it with armed guards. According to reports, to date 89 people have been killed in relation to local politics in the province since March 2014. No arrests have been made.

• A wide range of senior public representatives and officials have reported receiving death threats. They include former Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi, ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe, Human Settlements Minister Lindiwe Sisulu, former deputy finance minister Mcebisi Jonas, ANC chief whip Jackson Mthembu, South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) CEO Thokozani Magwaza, and ANC MP and former head of the ethics committee Ben Turok. Those are incidents reported in the media. No doubt, as one moves further away from the political centre, the problem escalates.

• In June, EFF leader Julius Malema tweeted: "WARNING: The @SACP1921 should strengthen security detail of Solly Mapaila, the old man is not happy at all with him & anything is possible." Mapaila is an outspoken critic of Jacob Zuma.

• Most recently, ANC MP Makhosi Khoza, who had signalled her intention to support the motion of no confidence in Jacob Zuma, received numerous death threats. Khoza has posted screenshots of the threatening messages. One read, "I will find you and kill you"; and another, "You have 21 days before you die."

• There is an increasing number of stories of attempted assassinations that result not in death but serious and often catastrophic injury. In June, former ANC Youth League secretary-general Sindiso Magaga and two other councillors were ambushed and shot. This week, an ANC councillor and head of the engineering portfolio in the Raymond Mhlaba municipality survived an assassination attempt. These incidents are less well documented because they don’t result in death but are no less common.

• Two members of the official opposition have been shot in ominous circumstances this year. DA councillor Xolile Gwangxu was shot dead outside the Philippi East Community Hall in Cape Town in June. A man walked up and shot him at point-blank range. This week, Gauteng member of the provincial legislature (MPL) Kingsol Chabalala, an outspoken critic of corruption, was shot three times outside his home. A DA statement said, "This brutal attack is reflective of SA’s volatile political climate, which is marked by intolerance and in the most extreme of cases political killings."

• A number of other political assassinations, attempted or unsuccessful, have taken place outside KwaZulu-Natal, mostly notably in the Eastern Cape. In July, the speaker of the Raymond Mhlaba municipality at Fort Beaufort Eastern Cape received death threats before being gunned down. Also in July, Nelson Mandela Bay mayor Athol Trollip revealed that the chief whip of the council, Werner Senekal, and the mayoral committee member for roads and transport, Rano Kayser, had received threats.

• All these are supplemented by other crimes this year that appear to be political. Offices of both the Eastern Cape and Johannesburg premiers have been set on fire. The cause is unknown. Also in the Eastern Cape, the Sassa offices in Mdantsane were destroyed in a fire. The Musina local municipality building in Polokwane and the Department of Social Development’s Buffalo City Metro nerve centre were gutted. Numerous ANC branch offices have been torched including in Tzaneen, Marikana, Philippi and Pretoria. Many other besides. The National Prosecuting Authority, the Hawks and even the chief justice have had their offices broken into and computer equipment stolen.

There is a war being fought. It is very real. The cost is very high. It has infected the highest echelons of the body politick and is transforming from an internal ANC problem to an external threat extending to the opposition.

People are dying. This is not normal. It is profoundly disturbing and, unless arrested, has all the hallmarks of a far more bloody and violent future to come, as uncertainty and division intensify.

Yet it is a war without a name. There is no sustained narrative for it like there is for, say, the Gupta family or the ANC’s succession race. Each of these elements is reported on piecemeal, each treated as an isolated phenomenon to be understood in and of itself. No investigative journalists have been assigned to look into potential links, causes and motivations. No pressure applied to the police. No front-page banner headlines are reserved for the latest "revelation" in this regard. No hashtags, protests, marchers or new civil society organisations formed to oppose it. The opposition barely mentions it, outside of threats to its members.

It is a nameless war, one that engenders no significant outrage, and it is intensifying. Forty-four people died at Marikana, the anniversary of which is being widely acknowledged this week. Twice that number have been shot dead for no more than politics in KwaZulu-Natal alone in the past 18 months.

It is true, the sheer quantity of this sort of violence is starting to have an effect on the public mind. Killings and attempted assassinations are now recognised as part of a trend in spaces such as social media. But the war is far more advanced than that. It has been slowly unfolding ever since Polokwane, and as its tentacles reach out to pull in aspects of the state historically out of its reach, it need now but claim the life of a senior public figure – a minister, MP, member of the provincial legislature or state official – for it to have arrived at the heart of our democracy.

All the signs are that it is on the doorstep, knocking.

One must be careful here: the implication is not that there is a single co-ordinating force behind all this — the reasons are complex and vary. But then that applies to any blight on society. The point is, we cannot seem to see the wood from the trees: the democracy we argue about on paper is not what is being practised on the ground, not in a great many places. But it is met by little more than denial.

It is symptomatic of how sick and broken our democracy is, that death itself can be so casually regarded. Our obsession with ideas such as "state capture", important but further down the moral hierarchy than murder, allow us to maintain the pretence that the problems we face are within the bounds of normality. For then we can evoke accountability mechanisms, the courts or the public protector, and by subcontracting our concern to the system, we can legitimise our fear.

But the war cares nothing for the system. These are murderers without names. Their motivation is not documented in e-mails. Their mechanisms are not tenders. Raw violence is the purest kind of moral corruption. When it is ubiquitous and out of control, as ours is, it fashions its own kind of political dispensation and the first thing it does, is render the formal system irrelevant. The rules by which it operates follow no logic other than hate.

Our criminal justice system, such as it is, run by agents of mediocrity such as Police Minister Fikile Mbalula, is no more able to respond to the problem than it is a victim of it. The criminal justice system is the fundamental pillar on which law and order rests. It is badly compromised. But its total and utter inability to deal with this problem is profound.

At the end of May, the unrelenting problem forced Mbalula to announce the establishment of a police task team consisting of members from the Hawks, Crime Intelligence and Special Investigating Unit to probe political killings in the province. Such killings had "reached [an] unprecedented and appalling level", he said.

It has been three months. What success has this unit had? How many arrests? How many assassinations foiled? Why are they not before the portfolio committee every week, reporting back? Does anyone even know the unit exists? Can anyone even name its head? You would think, given Zuma’s remarkable statement this week, its first order of business would be to visit him and get a statement. Certainly, you would think the unit would be the first port of call for the media.

But, nothing. Just a few headlines about the president’s claim, as if he had said he once choked on his morning coffee, a curious and seemingly isolated incident with its own narrative. We are past masters at normalising the abnormal. We see only what we want to see in the mirror. We see a flourishing democracy, rising nobly to fight things like "state capture".

That is the story we like to tell, because it makes us feel safe. All the signs are there that the problems we face are far more profound. And they all indicate the war is moving in one very clear direction: the national government and the opposition.

Perhaps someone senior does need to die for us to wake up. What a terrible, horrific thought. But read the evidence, set out above, and come to your own conclusion. Where does this end? Only one thing is for sure: we shall find out soon enough.