If people trying to earn a living are treated as a problem, we should not be surprised when they behave like one.
Violence in Johannesburg’s inner city was met with a predictable wave of righteous indignation from people in authority across the spectrum. They have competed to lecture informal traders on the need to behave like civilised people. Politicians and many commentators here enjoy nothing more than the cheap morality of denouncing people at the bottom of the pile. It gets them cheers from those whose opinions they value and there is no chance that anyone who dares to answer will be taken seriously.
But did the inner city turn ugly because the people who trade there don’t share the morals of their betters? Or was something else at play? It is not clear what happened because reporting has not exactly shown an interest in telling both sides of the story. But we do know that inner-city traders have been treated as a problem for years by the police, city authorities and most of the insiders in the public debate.
Many are foreign nationals, and we should all know how much prejudice they face. But you don’t need to be foreign to be dumped on in the inner city. South Africans who earn their living in informal trade are continually harassed too.
Trader organisations and rights activists have reported for years that inner-city merchants are repeatedly bullied. One reason is the attitude mentioned in last week’s column — they are not considered “real” business people because they don’t operate out of air-conditioned offices. Another is that formal businesses, so vocal about the need for free markets when their interests are at stake, want the authorities to curb the informal competition. So, traders are either herded into precincts that look neat because they are never polluted by customers — or simply driven away.
Whatever happened in the inner city over the past few days, this background is an important part of the story — particularly if we want to keep the public peace.
A common myth is that the best way to build an orderly society is to allow police as much power as they want. Because traders are demonised in Johannesburg’s inner city, police have great power there. Only the law limits them and public-interest law firms can’t be everywhere, so there is plenty of scope for bullying.
We have just seen evidence that this does not keep the peace. Around the world, police who are best at maintaining order are those who operate within rules that protect suspects’ rights. Those who have free rein increase lawlessness by alienating the people — who even the best police need to do their job — and by using their powers randomly rather than working to find out who did what to whom. They are also more likely to be corrupt.
So it is small wonder that when police acted against counterfeit goods they were resisted, not helped, and that some officers allegedly helped themselves to the goods. In a society as fractious as this one, order is not built by bullying people who are, in the main, simply trying to make a living. It needs willingness to learn what is happening on the ground and win support for the law and the police.
If the mainstream here was serious about keeping order, the violence would have been seen as a warning: we would have heard public calls for an inquiry to find out what went wrong and what is needed to fix it.
Instead we have only finger-pointing, which is likely to ensure that Johannesburg’s inner city remains a place of conflict, creating openings for more moralising by those who should know better.
• Friedman is research professor with the humanities faculty of the University of Johannesburg.
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