Over the past few days our vulnerabilities came to bear all at once: a country with only a thin veneer of law and order; a rejection of the socio-economic status quo by the marginalised; intolerable and rising inequality and poverty; a police force weakened by budget cuts and austerity; and a weak and fractured governing party whose internal battles are profoundly destabilising.
This is the cocktail of elements that gave rise to the chaos that has gripped the country since former president Jacob Zuma’s arrest last Wednesday. The protests and looting are not the manifestation of a popular uprising to support Zuma, but the outcome of what happens when deep social tension and frustrations, kept (mostly) in check in daily life, are emboldened to confront what is in fact a weak state, run by a weak governing party.
So while last week we celebrated the victory of the principle of law and order, this week we must face up to how paper-thin it is on the ground. People who live in townships and informal settlements know this better than anyone. It does not require much organisation, or incitement, to start a looting frenzy in an environment where the police have never actually established firm control and where the fires of violence are seldom properly extinguished since the last bout of lawlessness.
The first place where this is evident are the hostels around Johannesburg, the East Rand and Durban, during apartheid home to mostly Zulu migrant workers and hotspots of political violence. These hostels have always had and still have their own structures of authority, local mafia who control both access and the illegal activities that go on inside.
This dynamic of mafia “law enforcement” was bravely and brilliantly documented by civil society activist Vanessa Burger, who followed events at the Glebelands hostel in Umlazi between 2014 and 2019. About 120 people were murdered during this period. After the arrest of the Umlazi “hit squad” things were quiet until late 2020 when the killing began again, linked to the collection of “protection money” by the mafia.
Many informal settlements operate on a similar basis, with local mafia — elected or not elected — wielding the authority to allocate stands, collect rents and protection money from shop owners, especially foreign-owned ones, and mete out justice for crimes committed.
Closely linked to these hostels and informal settlements is the taxi industry, which apart from being the biggest employers of izinkabi — the colloquial Zulu word for hitmen — has always run on rules of its own with scant regard for the police or law and order, and high regard for settling matters by the gun.
The past few days of “Zuma violence” follows the pattern of the xenophobic violence we have seen before, where the so-called local “business forum” would call a protest march to complain about the dominance of foreign businesses, which would cause people to gather and would be really just a cover to loot amid the chaos.
Within this volatile and violent society the SA Police Service (SAPS) is declining in numbers and resources. The burden of the Treasury’s bid to contain government expenditure has fallen disproportionately on the police and, even more so, the military. Unable to cut front-line services in schools and hospitals, the Treasury has always — up until this February — protected health and education budgets. It has been police and the army where the budget cuts have been felt most.
Today, SA has fewer police than it did 10 years ago when there were 8-million fewer people to take care of. In 2011 the SAPS employed 193,892 people, but by 2020 there were 187,358 on the payroll. That number is expected to drop to 162,945 in 2023/2024 as the government moves to adjust the fiscal framework, cut spending and rein in debt. Those police are disproportionately distributed to the suburbs. An article by GroundUp in 2018 measured the police-to-population ratio in Camps Bay in Cape Town to be 887 per 100,000, while in Nyanga — at the time the precinct with the highest murder rate in the country — it was 161 per 100,000.
Finally, there is the weak and fractured ANC. While President Cyril Ramaphosa stood up on Sunday evening to condemn lawlessness, as he often has before, both the national and provincial government and the ANC are yet to engage people on the ground as to why Zuma was arrested and why his narrative about detention without trial is not true. As a result, the Zuma victim narrative is uncontested, and will remain so even after the military has arrived to enforce some kind of peace.
• Paton is editor at large.
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