Violent protests: You’re on your own, baby!

The unrest has been like a flash flood scouring a mountain. It has opened deep crevasses in some places and at others, uncovered the occasional granite outcrop.

The first lesson that we all need to take is one of life and death. These events are a stark reminder that in terms of the physical safety of you and your loved ones, as well as the preservation of your property and tools to earn a living, you are entirely on your own.

When confronted, government rolled over and played dead. In several KwaZulu-Natal towns, the SA Police Service barricaded themselves in their stations and had to be protected, as well as resupplied with ammunition, by the citizens they were supposed to be protecting.

The other unlikely “protectors of democracy” were the taxi mafia. After decades of using assassination and arson to eliminate commercial competitors and to wring concessions from the government, taxi bosses were momentarily cast as heroes when they intervened, out of self-interest, to prevent looting during the later stages of the unrest.

It was a disquieting reflection of where the real balance of power and credibility of intent in SA lies. One could watch on television how three taxis containing half a dozen men were easily able to interdict a rampaging mob from attacking a shopping mall, while a much larger force of nominally better armed and trained cops had about much deterrence value as a row of display mannequins.

The real heroes, though, were a patchily armed citizenry. Contrary to the lurid warnings of many, the militias appear to have been generally well disciplined and restrained.

Unpalatable though it may be to an antigun obby that has broad media support (as well as generous funding from philanthropists living in safe Western countries), it would be insanity for the government to proceed with its stated intention to disarm South Africans.

A more rational solution is to constrain firearm ownership within some kind of state security structure. South Africa’s previous system of Commandos a volunteer part-time force was enormously successful in maintaining security, especially in rural areas and at key points.

Despite the political stigma to the ANC of the Commandos being a Boer innovation dating back more than a century, the system has much to commend it. It’s a low-cost way of bolstering a SA National Defence Force and the police force.

It’s also an alternative to race-based vigilantism. Area-based commandos, pulling all races into a disciplined police-led force, would make far less likely the allegedly racial confrontation between African looters and Indian homeowners, that last week left 20 dead in the Phoenix community outside Durban.

The unacknowledged motivation behind the disbanding of the Commandos in 2003 is that the ANC fears a white “counter-revolution”. It’s an understandable but illusory fear.

Since 1994, the most potent efforts at “rebellion” from the white right have been a harebrained plot involving the Boeremag shelling Cape Town from a submarine. In contrast, last week’s “insurrection”, one of the most destructive and deadly single events in SA history, was triggered by disenchanted ANC supporters, including 12 senior party members identified by the ANC national executive as the ringleaders.

To find the biggest threat to the SA state, do the arithmetic.

The death toll in the Boeremag rebellion was zero and the ringleaders will spend up 30 years in jail. The death toll in the ANC rebellion is in the hundreds.

As to the likelihood of prison sentences for the most recent traitors? Probably zero.