Say what you want about the people running amok in Durban and Johannesburg, but they really do seem to know how to put real heart into a tribute to their idol; their looting, disabling of infrastructure and crippling of economic activity has all come together in a touchingly thoughtful diorama of the most memorable aspects of Jacob Zuma’s presidency.
Having said that, it remains unclear whether the majority are in fact acting on his behalf and, if they are, which rocket scientist thought widespread destruction would be the best argument for Zuma’s release.
I keep reading them described as “pro-Zuma”, but unless the former president has become disoriented and smuggled out a message that he’s being held inside the Woolies at Jabulani Mall in Soweto, this seems to be as much about taking a gap as it is about busting their champion out of the slammer. To be fair, it’s a distinction that’s easy to blur in SA.
On Saturday finance minister Tito Mboweni tweeted that “we must not allow the tendency of looting to take root in our country”, in bold defiance both of the looters and of reality. After all, between the colonial extraction machine, apartheid’s vast exploitation and at least a decade of intense theft by the ANC, the “tendency of looting” has not just taken root but has sprouted, grown into a sapling, dropped its seeds into every corner of our society and now stands proud; a dank, rotten forest casting an unnatural and eternal twilight over the little woodland creatures like you and me who scurry about between the trunks.
No, I’m afraid politics and criminality — and the rampant poverty and despair they produce — are intimately intertwined in SA’s past and present. Certainly, in some of the earliest reports coming out of KwaZulu-Natal at the weekend they seemed entirely indistinguishable as people claiming to be targeting a “captured” justice system and overthrowing Stellenbosch oligarchs promptly started burning down the businesses where their neighbours earn a meagre living.
For the police, this writhing, blurred thing — organised and anarchic, principled and criminal, the desperate poor exploding for but also because of the cunning rich — presents a wildly moving target. Which is perhaps one reason the SA Police Service seems to have stood feebly by in many instances, watching from a safe distance as looters made merry.
Inevitably, social media was full of angry accusations of police hypocrisy, largely echoing those expressed last week as crowds gathered outside Nkandla. If police minister Bheki Cele can unleash water cannons on pensioners queuing for social grants, they demanded to know, why can’t he do the same in the face of brazen lawlessness?
It feels like a sensible question, but just as Mboweni chose to ignore the deep criminality of this country it avoids having to acknowledge a more complex and distressing reality about policing in SA, namely that the laws of this country are simply an agreement endlessly up for renegotiation.
I’ve read plenty about the “rule of law” over the past few weeks, but I must confess that I’m sceptical about the popularity and power of this so-called ruler. Instead, I suspect we are a society of two sorts of citizen: those who find it easy or advantageous to obey the law, and who therefore police themselves; and those who find it disadvantageous, difficult or simply pointless to obey the law, and who have therefore come to understand, either with glee or contempt or resignation, just how powerless the police truly are.
In short, we are a society in which the police don’t police those who don’t need to be policed, and can’t police those who do. Cele’s constabulary was never going to be able to stop an eruption of this scale, regardless of whether it was organised by cynical villains, an expression of pent-up frustration after decades of broken promises and grinding poverty, or an opportunistic shopping spree.
Deploying the army was surely the last thing President Cyril Ramaphosa wanted to do, since it starts to demand clarity about whether we’re looking at a criminal phenomenon or a political one, and starts drawing conclusions Ramaphosa would rather not have drawn.
Yes, the SA National Defence Force is there to “support” the police. But simply by showing up they transform the fundamental nature of the crisis, at least on a psychological level. Police protect us against threats to life and property. But soldiers protect the state. Their deployment is a tacit admission by the state that it feels threatened, and that looters and stone-throwers might just be revolutionaries and secessionists.
The authority of Ramaphosa’s administration is being challenged in the most direct way yet. Once again, we are at a moment that might make us or break us. But when was it ever different?
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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