SA Unrest: Ramaphosa and his government were ‘caught napping’

In the early days of the unrest that engulfed KwaZulu-Natal and parts of Gauteng last week, one of the most bizarre suggestions for how to stop the pandemonium that was building up was that perhaps the authorities should let former President Jacob Zuma go free and not serve his 15-month contempt of court jail sentence.

This suggestion was based on the fact that reports of torched trucks on the N3 road and violence in KZN were escalating. It didn’t come out of the blue, it was a result of comments by political analysts who were basing their reasoning on the “greater good”.

What good comes from insisting on jailing one man but losing hundreds of lives in the unrest that follows?

It is now common knowledge that more than 200 lives were lost in the looting mayhem that followed the incarceration of Zuma.

It would be disingenuous, though, to suggest that any of those lives were lost in battles or skirmishes meant to stop the state from taking him to jail.

In fact, whenever members of the media asked people involved in the looting of businesses why they were doing so, the most common answer anecdotally was “we’re unemployed” or “we’re hungry”, never that they were fighting for Zuma to stay out of jail.

Part of this supposedly intellectually superior suggestion to quell the violence by letting Zuma go free came from a good place.

The place that asked, “what exactly would the country lose if Zuma did not go to jail for contempt of court?”

It was premised on saving the country from the damage to the economy that is now estimated to be in the billions of rands and the disruption to normal life that now sees people in parts of KZN and Gauteng queuing to buy ordinary necessities.

What these well-meaning suggestions miss is that any political strongman, now or in the future, can ride roughshod over the constitution and spit in the face of the citizenry, secure in the knowledge that the country’s laws do not apply to them.

Yes, it might sound like the suggestion is “make an example out of Zuma no matter what the consequences are”, and that’s not far from the truth.

South Africa’s biggest mistake in the past two weeks has not been the unnecessary pursuit of an errant former president to its own detriment, it is that it has chosen a government that was caught napping, along with its president and his intelligence detail.

When the throngs of Zuma supporters (including his children) threatened that they would never allow him to be taken to jail without a battle, President Cyril Ramaphosa and his government should have sat up and taken notice.

South Africa has many issues, the biggest of which is poverty. The artificial, gross inequalities created through decades of racial inequality require singular focus by government to address through economic initiatives.

Any political opportunist can harness the painful emotional burden of being poor and hungry into a potent and destructive political force that can destroy a country overnight, as nearly happened here over the past two weeks.

That can only happen if the government is sleeping on duty, though.

President Cyril Ramaphosa and his government were caught napping.