“Truthful tales shall be told”, the late Mafika Gwala says in one of his poems, “of how the Children of Nonti pushed their will, and continued to live by the peace that Nonti once taught them.” Published in 1977, in much more riotous times than now, Gwala’s reference to Nonti Nzimande could have been of the same people Madiba spoke of, “who make peace and build, even where it is easy to break down and destroy”.
At some stage over the last few weeks there was a real risk of large “domino effect” force majeures across the entire supply chain. It is therefore a welcome development that most of the freight and logistics elements of this essential supply chain are now fully operational. We have opted for peace and to build, but it is far from over.
Last year Transnet suggested the Natcor line (which operates 22 trains a day transporting cars, coal, general and agricultural goods) was the hardest hit by the theft of overhead cables, and two years ago, the KwaZulu-Natal government condemned the torching of trucks on the N3 and firms in the Isithebe Industrial Estate at Mandeni. So, in many ways what we saw over the last few weeks is an extension of long-standing “activity” whose scope and scale was amplified by the recent incarceration of former president Jacob Zuma.
The shift in scope coincided with a mobilisation of generally chaotic scenes of looting in malls, to obscure the scaling up of the long-standing assault on key sites of economic infrastructure. This time its scale went beyond passenger and freight rail infrastructure and key industrial sites to include malls in townships like Vosloorus in the East Rand, right through to small towns such as uMzimkhulu and Nongoma. It has revealed important aspects of our economic life that leave us vulnerable to disruption, let alone the type of coups and insurrections we’ve seen elsewhere.
While it certainly has not spooked investors, as many have suggested, it is clear that the issues that give rise to social discord (which are constitutive, but not the only reason for this unrest) have an impact on firm profitability and the long-term commitments companies can potentially make. That is material, precisely because it suggests what might be needed is not just a security response in the immediate term to protect life and limb, but also to confront what “conditions of hardship” have lit the tinderbox of the unrest we saw, as the president asked.
The other concern is around the pervasive capacity for violence in a context where the state is expected to have a monopoly over violence. While the violence has not been particularly driven by ethnic mobilisation, it has exposed crude legacies of the type of society we were, and in many instances remain. This is not just in the communities of those faced with hardship, but as we saw in Phoenix, a cruder working-class version of the ad hoc enclosure of streets and roaming security firm hatchback vehicles driven by heavily armed men in the suburbs. Two sides of the same coin.
It is a reminder of the state capacity we need to build to enable and secure all of our lives, especially in instances where we have no resources to opt for private provision or the means to isolate opportunistic criminal elements in our communities. Building the capacity of our security cluster must also isolate the saboteurs from the hungry and desperate.
Over-policing the opportunistic edge of the hungry, rather than targeting aspirant accumulators and economic saboteurs, makes the conditions of hardship even greater. Especially if we accept that there are too many people with too little or nothing to lose, and too much production happening in too few places — which all present systemic vulnerability of the economic system.
As we aim to build forward better, the need to diversify and expand where we produce is as important as securing the peace Madiba and the Children of Nonti taught us.
• Ayabonga Cawe (@aycawe), a development economist, is MD of Xesibe Holdings and hosts MetroFMTalk on Metro FM.
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