Under the circumstances, reports of assaults are unsurprising

Granted, whatever you find trending on Twitter can’t be an exclusive basis for any authoritative report, but the claims of abuse are something President Cyril Ramaphosa’s team is going to have to watch closely because as those claims cause loss of support, it may be the anvil to break the camel’s back.

The changing of the South African Defence Force to the South African National Defence Force inspired some unity among a military made of previously separate militias and armies, though it still had “force” in there – and sure, you would probably want much more force in your national defence than you would in your police, but I doubt they ever considered whether they would need to point their defence force on their own people ever again.

It’s easy to call for a total lockdown. The consequences may be disastrous, but to design a total lockdown is simple.

What is not simple is structuring how you deviate from a total lockdown; who is allowed to do what, when, how to enforce it … and all this while your political opponents are singing Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better.

What’s worse, here, you have to do that in a country where political education is so jaded, maintaining a hold on a narrative is a sensitive stab in the dark with no undo button and people’s immediate interests are in many respects diametrically opposed.

Quick example: if you’ve got lots of money, you probably won’t care if the price of bread goes from R11.99 to R15. You might not even notice.

If you have no money, you might not even care if there’s just another thing added to the list of potential causes of death if it stands between you and eating on the day.

So planning this lockdown is a balancing act no person could envy and any plan certainly won’t please all the people all the time so you hope that, generally, people are more pleased than they are upset by your response.

The first thing to do to get as many on board from the off is to lay it out as a reality we need to deal with. This is why Ramaphosa starts his speeches by telling us how the global situation is bad, followed by a sly but important mention of countries doing a worse job at dealing with it than we are.

With that political capital, one can cultivate significant buy-in to some difficult decisions.

But a democratic populace would never buy in to being assaulted by its own defence force, so as reports of that happening occur, regardless of their legitimacy, Ramaphosa and his team lose political capital.

What do you expect when you deploy a defence force which hasn’t seen action in over a decade with authority to enforce a broad and sometimes vague set of rules … rules that might not accommodate for a significant number of peoples’ needs?

In the same breath as his appeal to the army that this was not a moment for skop, skiet en donder violence, he also impressed on them the importance of the frontline work they will be doing. At the same time, he reassures the soldiers that our people are not hostile. They are not going to be against them. They are not going to resist them.

All that sounds great until you find those who do resist … or an enforcement officer who does not understand the complexity of the situation … or the complexity of the laws and regulations … or a civilian who is desperate and cannot abide by the regulations … or a civilian who does not understand the complexity of the law/situation.

But if you take a relatively inexperienced defence force, point it at its own people, give it a novel mission and emphasise how important the work they’re doing is while telling them that people will respect the regulations, knowing that many won’t and some can’t, you’re creating a pressure cooker.

Ramaphosa will have to address the issue of enforcement brutality – and if he wants to maintain a hold on the narrative, he’ll have to do it sooner, rather than later.

Richard Anthony Chemaly entertainment attorney, radio broadcaster and lecturer of communication ethics.

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