Law and order may be an archaic phrase denigrated for its association with apartheid, but the stark reality today is that our fledgling democracy is desperately in need of that dose of medicine.
The other day I went to a talk by former President Kgalema Motlhanthe at the City Hall in downtown Jozi to commemorate 20 years of the advent of democracy.
In his talk, Motlhanthe likened democracy to a line drawn to say all people must stop before the line, but when you then get others stopping well after that line, then it tells you that you have a big problem.
I then took this apt narration and equated it to our reality today, where you have a stop line either at a traffic light or stop sign-controlled intersection and a certain number of our motorists deliberately disobey this ‘house rule’ as Motlhanthe put it and stop well beyond the line.
Surely this must tell you there is something gravely wrong in our society, or should I say with the administration and enforcement of
orderly traffic laws and regulations, and this too may well translate to many other spheres in our country, such as corruption and the enforcement of law in general.
Look at the level at which taxi drivers disobey road rules and regulations in our country, with scant regard for traffic officers who equally disobey the powers invested upon them and seem powerless to enforce the laws.
I often say to friends of mine that there is no administration that is as oppressive as democracy, and when they argue I always give them this analogue.
Democracy is not freedom to do what one likes. Democracy is exactly the opposite of that. Democracy is about ‘not doing what one likes but doing what will not offend the next person to you’. People often mistake it and equate democracy to doing what they like, as the taxi drivers are doing.
Democracy is like you in the home. If you’re a couple, one of you cannot do something that will offend the other party, and so it goes for your neighbours, communities with other communities, cities with other cities, provinces with other provinces, nations with other nations and so forth.
If you don’t have democracy in South Africa and you trample on peoples’ rights and abuse your powers and detain them left, right and centre, this will certainly affect your neighbours, including countries far afield as the United States, who will not look away.
You will have hordes and hordes of people leaving your country to seek greener pastures elsewhere, as is the case now with the migrant disaster in north Africa.
The only problem with a dictatorship is that there is only one person who can do what he likes, and that is the dictator himself. The rest of the citizens have no say but to be submissive to the whims of this despot.
