It will likely make me few friends, but I think the national commissioner for correctional services, Makgothi Thobakgale, made the right decision with regard to former president Jacob Zuma’s possible re-incarceration.
It gives me no pleasure whatsoever to say this, and I think that is actually the point — that being principled is sometimes downright torture.
It is natural to ask, even to reach assumptions, about whether former commissioner Arthur Fraser and Zuma connived together to develop a plan that saw Fraser throwing out the decisions of the medical parole advisory board and release Zuma from his wholly deserved incarceration.
It’s normal to be incandescently furious about that, because it is a clear breach of natural justice. But while it is clear Fraser acted in Zuma’s interest, there is no actual evidence that he acted on Zuma’s orders or at his request.
All we want is for Zuma to face the law like the rest of us would, to have equal treatment in his interaction with the state. And so we must bite our tongues when Thobakgale does just that.
Zuma is the most appalling constitutional delinquent. He has repeatedly shown his disdain for the pillars of our democracy — the courts, parliament, the constitution, the various institutions that are designed to protect us from people just like him — and of course the media.
His supporters were behind the killing, economic destruction and tragedy of July 2021. He is a criminal and has presided over the death of hope for a generation of poor South Africans, who are mainly young and black.
But in our constitutional order Zuma is an inmate who was released from jail in error by the state. That he is responsible in many ways for the parlous condition of the state does not change this fact. It was the state that erred in releasing him, the same state that specialises in wrongful arrests, lost dockets and other jurisprudential innovations perfected under the Zuma administrations.
As such, no matter your view of Zuma and his effect on our country, Thobakgale exhibited leadership by gritting his teeth and letting our nation’s pre-eminent thug go free. It is proof, were it needed, that not only are we better than the standards set by Zuma in office, but that our institutions have to a degree survived his worst attempts at destruction.
Rage and vested interest
Zuma is free, and we should be proud; we have beaten him. It isn’t easy though, and I expect some fruity replies to this column. It might help to contrast the Zuma business with the violent taxi strike in Cape Town over the past week. Again, finding the principled wood in the forest of rage and vested interest proved hard for many of us.
Taxi operators have become altogether too comfortable with not having to bother with the law. In fact the drivers, who all other road users rightly decry as dangerous hooligans, essentially have lawlessness built into their incentive structures. Anyone who has driven out of Cape Town in the morning against the heavy traffic coming in on the N2 will have witnessed the speed and recklessness with which the empty taxis return to the outlying suburbs and townships for their next load of passengers. It’s terrifying, illegal and wrong.
The DA, through its leadership in the Western Cape and City of Cape Town, saw an opportunity in its dispute with the taxi operators to make a statement about the primacy of law and order over gangsterism and impunity. It was certainly a useful political moment at a time when elections are looming, aided no end by the transport minister’s embarrassing interventions, in which she so clearly laid out her knee-jerk position on such matters; she doesn’t understand the law and in any case finds it inconvenient. It took a hurried cabinet statement to bury the silliness.
The sheer ugliness of the racial spatial dynamics of Cape Town, and the taxi industry’s role in ferrying mainly working-class black people from townships to the city, clouded the issue. It is normal, dare I say, to feel incandescently furious about the unjust nature of SA’s human geography — so visible in Cape Town — and the concomitantly unequal effect of the taxi strike.
But that does not undo the truth that Cape Town’s hands-on mayor, Geordin Hill-Lewis, was right to pick this fight — and to win it. Principles aren’t principles if they don’t stand up to a test. They’re just platitudes, as meaningful as an Instagram motivational meme. It has been a fraught few weeks in this country, and people have died in a horrifically violent series of attacks likely perpetrated by taxi industry thugs. It has been a test, and we have seen some real mettle.
Thobakgale stood up to a cacophony of righteous incantations that Zuma go back to jail. Hill-Lewis stood courageously on the principle that all road users must obey the laws associated with their licences in the face of the most artless intimidation, violence and murder. People even arrived at a meeting with AK-47s, the mayor reported.
I’m proud of them both. Rumours of our institutional demise may indeed be unfounded.
• Parker is Business Day editor-in-chief.
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