Whenever something like the live-to-air mugging of a South African TV personality takes place, I conjure up the smug, hectoring voice of a white South African ex-pat in Brisbane exclaiming: I told you so, mate. There he is in my mind’s eye, drinking Queensland Merlot through a straw, watching the footage on the internet—HD images that prove to both him and his third wife that this country has gone down the YouTubes.

Ah, but when, I ask, was South Africa up the tubes? Back when Cecil John Rhodes was an actual person, and not statue protestors threw shit at? Come now. How can a place with a history like this one ever be anything but a rambling, shakily built work in progress? How can our TV personalities not get mugged on air?

Where else would –or should – a South African TV personality be mugged but on our collective, hi-def flatscreens?

That last question is, of course, a tree-falling-in-the-forest conundrum, one of those Buddhist riddles that could go one of several ways. And here’s the first: perhaps we need smarter criminals. Mvoko’s phone-jackers did not appear to be the sharper end of this country’s lengthy criminous stick. To their enormous discredit, they didn’t even seem drunk. Just two bad guys straight from central casting mugging a dude right in front of the camera. Officious, pushy, almost bureaucratic in their efficiency. Functionaries doing a job that is ordinarily done with the use of a balaclava, in the dark, late at night, in a blind alley.

Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

Or am I missing the point? For there is another way to interpret this footage: the live-to-air mugging was not a mistake, but a statement. The problem with this country – is and always has always been – one of accountability. As in, no one has any. In this second reading of the riddle, our robbers were likely thinking: Who cares if there’s a camera? What difference does it make? No one gets done for anything in this place. Ever.

Short of leaving names, addresses, fingerprints and a trail of bread crumbs to their lair, the muggers could not have telegraphed themselves more clearly to the authorities. Given that this was not, judging from their body language, their first phone-jacking experience, one assumes that they know just how unlikely it was that they’d be arrested for their crime, regardless of how many times it’s ‘shared’ on freaking Facebook. The SAPS have offered a reward for tips – for men that were caught in the act of robbing a TV reporter live during prime time. Does everyone in South Africa watching TV get a cheque in the mail next week?

I see a metaphor at work here –South Africa is a country of camera un-shy robbers, a thought that demands our taking a quick jog through our ignominious recent history. Like studio guests on an Oprah Christmas special, post-apartheid white South Africans get to feel good about living in a liberated Hugtopia AAAAAAAAAAAAAAND they got to keep their houses and all their money. The bad guys who ran the show during the old regime were gifted Stellenbosch AAAAAAAAAAAAAAND allowed to keep the Broederbond intact, so long as they got even richer and shared it with seven BEE insiders. Every sin that’s been committed in the name of democracy – from shooting miners in the back to pimping the prez’s crib – has gone unpunished. Jackie Selebi and a handful of other dead strugglistas remain the only fall guys in South Africa’s recent history of mugging its citizens live on camera.

Let’s put it another way: Cecil John Frigging Rhodes still has his bronzed likeness standing in a major South African University. If the grandmaster of colonial acquisitiveness can still be a pigeon toilet in one of this country’s more esteemed educational institutions, then who exactly pays for anything in this country?

And so the SABC robbers are not just robbers, but archetypes, winged Enochs that sweep down from above and explain us to ourselves while we’re trying to confuse ourselves into thinking we’re something that we’re not.

Or perhaps I still don’t have it right.

Were the robbers a performance art piece, two rangy mimes running through the mechanisms of the Secrecy Bill? Is this what the press will look like in five years – a live-to-air performance robbed of life and air by no-name hacks unafraid of having their faces YouTubed? Was this a warning from the government – there but for the grace of a misstatement about Nkandla go we? We’re talking about the state broadcaster here, the institution that has always protected and cosseted South African governments. If they aren’t immune from mugging, then the mugging must not be a mugging and must be something else – something more sinister, more sweeping, more coded.

I’m talking crazy here, of course. Sometimes a mugging is just a mugging. But there was a brazenness in the actions we all watched on TV, a fearlessness that spoke of the absence of the need for fear that should make those of us who don’t mug TV personalities very afraid. No one cares. No one pays. And in a country in which no one is ever held to account, EEEEEEEEEEEEEVERYONE gets to act like an asshole.

Which is not exactly where we are in South Africa quite yet. There are good guys, and there are bad guys. Both get to run around in the harsh light of day – or, rather, in the rough glare of a TV lamp – without having to worry about covering our faces. But before we tip into the darkside and the good guys are forced to run around in balaclavas, we may want to think about the kind of bad guys we keep. Perhaps the SAPS will find our fearless antagonists and remind them that cameras are something to fear, and that every now and again, a misdeed goes punished. Even in South Africa. Perhaps. DM