Is the only way to deal with extortionists to kill them? Of course not, but that does seem to be what is happening.
Watching the news every day is like watching a never-ending cops and robbers series — only this is real life, real lives, real people, people who live(d) just down the road, people who were not always like this.
Gunshot detection (an acoustic system that can instantly report the source of a gunshot) was installed in the gangster-plagued Cape Town suburb of Lavender Hill (once home to abundant lavender fields). Reports now available show that guns are fired at a rate close to 1,000 a month. That is beyond horrible, and Lavender Hill not an isolated case.
I sympathise with all law enforcement agents that have to deal with violent crime. At some desperate point there must seem no alternative but to meet force with force. Often it is nothing more than self-defence. The trouble is that mistakes can be made (particularly in the heat of the moment) and, like the death penalty, the possibility of one wrong death rules it out as a solution.
Counter-violence expands and intensifies violence, it doesn’t contain it. The return on risk is always higher for the gangsters than the police, which results in a lot of the fight happening between rival gangs, vying for territorial dominance.
Everyone gets caught in the crossfire, and revenge becomes the currency of the day. In no time there is a parallel “rule of law” that preys on, instead of protecting, the innocent and vulnerable. Children growing up in such environments seldom escape the scars inflicted on them. Often the choice is binary — join a gang or run away.
We have to find another way. It’s starts with the value of life. One measure of your life’s worth is your expectations and prospects for the future. We won’t solve the problems of our gangster lands at once, or with a set of rules, but we can change how people feel about their futures. We can lay foundations for the prospects of safety, dignity and prosperity. Sustained community healing will only result from community involvement. We must create local vested interest and positive peer pressure.
We need to take opportunities to the people, whenever that’s practical. The construction mafia would find it far more difficult if they were robbing their own people, people who lived down the road, who knew them, who had stood next to them on the side of the field watching each others’ kids play soccer. Train and employ locals to build local schools and other facilities, to fix infrastructure, to manage waste and litter, to self-regulate.
Extortion is personal and scary. No matter how big and tough you might be, you’re vulnerable, if only because you want to protect those you care for. Kidnapping would have no future if either nobody cared about each other or if everyone cared about each other. Killing for money has no future, other than self-destruction. Money isn’t a great life currency.
It would of course help if stealing money on a grand scale was not happening at much higher levels in the social hierarchy. The corruption landscape (in both the public and private sectors) — particularly given that there are little or no consequences, and the deferral of justice is commonplace — motivates the unscrupulous, disenfranchised, wretched people among us to make lives (and take lives) in the pursuit of money.
Ill-gotten gains don’t quench thirst, they create it. Public displays of opulent wealth quickly move from being admired to being despised. Everyone knows who you are, and you’ll find that out for yourself when you’re sitting in a crowded club, in the early morning hours sipping expensive champagne — as lonely as all hell, as scared as your victims were when you first ruined their lives.
• Barnes is an investment banker with more than 35 years’ experience in various capacities in the financial sector.
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