If one is generous, one can argue that some Zuma supporters were initially exercised by outrage and loyalty to their benefactor, expressing their dissatisfaction through the time-honoured South African ritual of breaking things. Of course, for the rest of us, the Zuma incarceration was a misty moment of judicial triumph. But OK, not everyone felt that way, and most of us thought they would rage for a day or so, and then recede, swearing never to vote for the ANC again.
But now all hell has broken loose, little of it to do with Zuma any more.
How easy is it to start a riot? Very, it seems. Send a WhatsApp message to five, maybe 10 willing participants. Arrange to meet at a mall. Throw a rock, break a window. Shoppers flee in terror. Then go on social media and say come on down, free goodies. And hundreds of people arrive. More windows broken and looting. Then cell phone videos. Then more people.
Who are these people? One wonders. One of the many videos I watched was a nattily-dressed middle-aged man trying to shoe-horn a truly massive flat-screen TV into his upscale car. This was in a mall in Johannesburg. I thought — does this guy care about Zuma? I doubt it. The looters calmly exiting the mall with bulging shopping carts, included portly mamas, smiling jean-wearing 30-somethings, groups of giggling teenagers. They all had the same look on their faces.
Joy. Glee. Getting away with something.
I have no way of knowing what the desperation levels of the looters were. Whether they had been vainly seeking a dignified job for years and had run out of rope and hope. It didn’t look like it on my screen, but then this particular mall was in a nicer part of town. I am sure that in other spots, like Vosloorus, there were those among the looters who were stealing for utility rather than gees.
But here was the common theme. None of these people seemed to give a damn. Not about the jobs that will surely be lost — most of them at the tenuous bottom end of the economic scale — not about the shame of breaking a social and religious no-no, and certainly not about the long-lasting damage that will be wrought on this country’s sense of itself and the rest of the world’s view of it.
And whatever remains of its pride, now in tatters.
Where, we might ask, were the government institutions tasked with safeguarding its citizens? Where were the police? And where were the intelligence services? Surely they were monitoring social media, getting to hotspots either before or within minutes of trouble? Surely they have embedded human assets among cells of discontent, who keep an eye out for this sort of thing? Surely there are fast reaction teams and nimble crowd control squads? These questions are obviously rhetorical.
Like much else under this government’s control, the job that they are required to do does not get done. We are adrift in a sea of non-governance.
And the president? He came on TV and appealed for calm. Threatened the “full might” of whatever. He said nothing. He calmed no one. He had no plan. Other than soldiers in uniform with no training for the job. And so we become just another pitied country with its army on the streets.
Perhaps the most frightening aspect of all lies not in our failing institutions or citizens prepared to steal without shame. It is rather here: there are those in the body politic with large axes to grind; those with vaulting ambitions and plans to attain undeserved wealth and power. People like Ace Magashule and Julius Malema and those close to the now-empty Zuma throne.
To them, this must have been a revelation.
So easy to do this. So easy to stir the pot of violence and theft to position yourself for the next round of power politics. Just send a tweet, a WhatsApp message to 10 or 15 pliable comrades of dubious moral backbone.
Break a store window.
Break a country. DM
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This level of mayhem is not endemic to SA alone. One only has to cast their eyes over at the US to see how easy it is to fan the flames of discord. Masses of people managed to storm Capitol Hill and it was pretty much unencumbered. There are quite a few examples of similar scenes just scan the world news covering the last year.
I don’t condone violence or looting at all. But history points very clearly to the fact that when things are economically unbalanced poverty breeds outrage to the point of carnage in the disillusioned.
The French Revolutonaries wreaked mayhem in their cities – not only looting but murdering too – as did the Russians – as did the Germanic tribes on the Roman Empire & so it goes.
If the system cannot look after everyone in a balanced meaningful way the outcome is far from Eutopian.
Adam Smiths ideas of systems functioning efficiently if individuals operate purely from self interest is fundamentally flawed. Perhaps if the starting point was “all thing being equal” the outcomes of this current system would not be so lop sided.
A system in antiquity ruled by Emperors and the Church which moved to power held by land owners, & nobility with a hangover, to government & big business with still more hangover.
There is something wrong, not only here, but globally, where it is ok for one person to be worth $200bn and another sits in Madagascar eating aloe leaves to survive. The whole thing is unjust. And has culminated into little fires everywhere.
Yes, I agree. There are large systemic inequities at play that no amount of soldiers can fix. And the real solutions would be decades in the making (rebuilding education from scratch, for instance), if anyone had the balls to implement them. Catch-22.