Much will be written about the mass looting engulfing KwaZulu-Natal in the coming days, and it will be twofold in nature. First, an attempt to understand why, though the reasons appear relatively straightforward. Second, an attempt to explain the inadequacy of the response, though, again, the reasons are relatively obvious. If they are honest, both will have the ANC in common, and a government that has ripped the heart out of the economy and the democratic institutions we rely on to maintain some semblance of normality.
But the great unknown is the effect of all this, short and long term, on the body politic. And that is worth considering, for it will be significant.
Democracy in SA is more an idea than a reality. It is, on its best day, an aspiration. On its worst, an aberration. Either way, there is a simple misconception that underpins our general attitude: that cause and effect enjoy a symbiotic relationship. That poor performance will be met with meaningful, if not corrective, consequences, and that a vote implies an obligation on the part of those who receive it. It is not true.
There is a grand disjuncture between those who govern and the governed. Certainly in KwaZulu-Natal there is no link. No cause and effect. The people know this. And this week they ran with it, for it works both ways.
Informally, much of ANC politics is not won or lost on reason but brute force. Not two weeks ago, President Cyril Ramaphosa pleaded to his party, to “root out the thugs”, after it emerged that two people had been shot and 14 wounded at an ANC branch meeting. But there have been, over the past decade, a thousand such meetings. At some point, somehow, the ANC will elect a potential public representative. It will do so, often, through the barrel of a gun. Only then does democracy come into play.
On Monday, another ANC councillor was shot dead outside her home in Cape Town. She was the latest in a long list of about 100 similar assassinations stretching back over a decade, and it is no surprise the bulk of them come from KwaZulu-Natal.
If not outright violence, then the threat of violence. If not the threat of violence, then some crude factionalism. KwaZulu-Natal, the backbone of the ANC’s contemporary support base, is a land where the rule of violence, not the rule of law, determines political outcomes. And it is all done lone before the final candidate, inevitably dripping with the blood of his or her colleagues, is put to the popular vote. That is the pretence.
Even when the pretence has won out in the province, the ANC’s formal politics are rotten to the core, people and policies alike. It delivers only disappointment and desperation. And power is diffuse, and ambiguous, difficult to trace back to its source. Not just in the ANC, whose provincial politics are so destroyed by factionalism, and factionalism so infectious, it is hard to tell where party and state begin or end, but elsewhere too.
It is no coincidence either, that as the backdrop to all this, we have a battle for a new king of the Zulu nation. The rise of a “traditional prime minister”, and a messy ethnic power struggle. There are governments and kings in KwaZulu-Natal, and citizens and subjects. There are laws and decrees; democracy and royalty; chiefs and elected officials. And they all sit side by side; if not, then embodied in a single person. Jacob Zuma held it all together, if only by default.
Zuma underpins the ANC’s recent success in the province. In 2004, just 1.28-million people voted ANC. In 2014, it had doubled to 2.47-million, and now stood alone as the ANC’s biggest provincial support base. It was all done through the politics of demagogic grievance, not policy and performance. That is no foundation at all. It relies absolutely on personality, and makes a mockery of cause and effect. Thus, in 2019, the ANC’s provincial support in KwaZulu-Natal shrank dramatically, down to 1.97-million — half-a-million Zuma voters gone, and they were not happy.
There are signs the EFF has capitalised on some of this. It continues to do a roaring trade in KwaZulu-Natal by-elections and, though off a small base, it grew its vote share exponentially in the province in 2019, up from 70,000 to 350,000 votes. That tells you something. But most of that missing 500,000 did not make their mark at all. Even the red-hot emotional cauldron of hate and intolerance that is the EFF, was not enough for them.
Lawlessness is common cause in KwaZulu-Natal. Pietermaritzburg has been the epicentre most recently, but the forms this violence takes are many and various. The N3 is a war zone. Trucks are burnt there on a regular basis. Taxi owners kill and maim each other at almost the same rate ANC politicians do. And xenophobia, particularly against Indian South Africans bubbles constantly just below the surface.
When you have a criminal enterprise overseeing a society in which ideas like “the law” and “free choice” are not real but imagined, the social contract is broken. With it, cause and effect are detached from one another. The constitutional system we have assumes much more than it proscribes, and above all, it assumes that contract: an unstated norm — that the people and their leaders listen to each other, and adjust their respective behaviour accordingly.
This week saw the final and inevitable result of that break. It snapped completely. With it, those things we take for granted. There was only anarchy and chaos, violence and law breaking, all run rampant and beyond control. Few things are more disturbing. When that link is totally abolished, you have nowhere to turn. Democracy is rendered inert, and only force can effectively counter the mayhem.
The assumption, at this point, is that order comes at a political cost: effectively putting your own supporters under martial law cannot ever engender affection and understanding. But that assumption is a democratic one; it makes the mistake of assuming cause and effect. It is not how our politics works. It is not how the ANC works. And it is not how a province that has no experience of good governance and order, understands the rules.
The first sum that will be done by those who perpetually pander to the ANC, is that only the ANC can solve this. And it can solve it only informally, not formally. Democracy is not the answer. This is a “special” situation, that requires faith and belief in the powers that be. It needs behind-the-scenes “negotiators”, “wise elders”, and informal talks with power brokers, that a peace might be obtained. That narrative is coming. It is to negate the very essence of a democracy. But then, democracy was only ever a pretence in KwaZulu-Natal; every one is in on it. It is how KwaZulu-Natal exists at all.
Now is not the time, we will be told, for tough opposition. Now is not the time for opposition at all. Certainly not for cause and effect. We need “amnesties” and “consultation”. This is a political problem, that requires a political solution, and there is only one party that can do that. It is the formula through which the ANC has held KwaZulu-Natal ransom for 27 years now.
Democratic KwaZulu-Natal, such as it is, was born into violence and negotiation. Jacob Zuma earned his stripes at the time, negotiating a settlement. It is appropriate that he is at the heart of the current crisis. And while it is unlikely his plight is the real driver of the mass looting and vandalism, his politics indisputably is. The province is not part of the constitutional order in the way the rest of the country is. It has its own rules, and they have nothing to do with best democratic practice, and everything to do with informal power.
In the big picture, the greatest damage done over the past week is to our democratic dispensation. You have seen KwaZulu-Natal regress, all the way back to 1994. Don’t think for a moment democracy will help you out of this mess — it has absolutely nothing to offer, and KwaZulu-Natal is immune to it. But, for the ANC, the crisis is a godsend: now it can reassert itself as the informal and hegemonic alpha and omega in SA politics.
In between cause and effect in SA sits the ANC. It shares that space with mayhem. It is how it controls our constitutional order. The two meet only when it allows them to. It will see a giant space opening up for itself now in KwaZulu-Natal and, in response, it will fill it with more of the poison that renders that province a land unto itself. How grateful so many will be.
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