Public violence shows we’re sliding towards failed state

As nations stumble towards collapse, there’s inevitably speculation about what the tipping point will be.

In truth, there’s rarely a single event that can be foreseen that will trigger the final implosion. Rather, there are a series of cumulatively critical moments.

In SA, one of the most worrying potential tipping points is the erosion of law and order.

At a white-collar crime level, it can be seen in the looting of state and business assets. At a criminal violence level, it can be seen not only in some of the world’s worst murder, rape and assault markers, but by growing public anarchy.

Public violence is approaching levels last seen in the political uprisings of the mid-’80s. Then, it was brought under tenuous control by the National Party government unleashing its own massive, retaliatory violence. Now, public unrest is mostly unpoliced and has become so ubiquitous as to be unremarkable.

The national broadcaster has developed a format that is as mundane to locals as it must be scary to overseas visitors. After the news and the weather, the traffic report now includes, as routine, a long list of roads, intersections and highways to avoid because of stone-throwers and fiery barricades.

Almost any of these incidents is a microcosm of all that is failing in SA society. There’s a grievance – often real but blown up out of all proportion – combined with the assumption by the aggrieved that any means of obtaining redress is justifiable and that they will not suffer serious consequences for criminal acts.

Take the ongoing student riots at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, with a professor hospitalised this week after being assaulted with a brick. Students reluctant to join the protests have been assaulted.

So far this year, the UKZN students, numbering about 1,000 out of an enrolment of close to 50,000, have burnt down the HIV clinic and two campus security offices.

The SAPS’ nationwide strategy seems to be one of containment, trying to prevent the violence from spreading. As SAPS put it, the police will monitor protests and “take appropriate action when protesters commit a crime”. But at the universities, arrests have been few and far between.

It’s not all the fault of the police.

It must be wearisome for the cops to see their best efforts thwarted by a supine and endlessly accommodating political establishment. #FeesMustFall thug Kanya Cekeshe, sentenced to eight years’ jail for public violence for trying to set a van full of cops alight, of which three years were suspended, spent less than two in prison. He was released following a campaign for mercy to be extended to the “political prisoner”.

It is not coincidence, given their pseudo-military affectations, that at many incidents of public disorder can be seen the red berets of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). It’s not clear whether they are enthusiastic participators in existing chaos or orchestrating it. Or both.

What is clear, however, is that the government is incapable of acting forcefully against any public violence that has attached to it even the vaguest connotation of leftist political action. To do so, it fears, would be to strengthen the EFF and to weaken its credibility and support among an increasingly militant black youth.

Unfortunately, the government is absolutely right. And, even more unfortunately, that means we are sliding towards one of the most important triggers of a failed state — widespread and uncontrollable mob violence, fomented by sinister populist forces.

William Saunderson-Meyer.

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