MICHAEL MORRIS: Uncivilised conduct now ordinary and acceptable - Business Day
Michael Morris
SA proved itself once again to be a country of diminishing surprises on Friday when we learnt that, as former president Jacob Zuma hadn’t been “feeling well” earlier in the week, he had — what else could he have done? — flown to Russia to get medical attention.
Zuma’s departure seemed distinctly nick-of-time-ish, given Thursday’s Constitutional Court ruling that the former president must go back to prison. Who’s to say fate is no friend?
What leapt out at me was the reported detail that the wily old chess player was “accompanied by six VIP protectors paid for by the state” — chiefly in light of the gist of the withering Financial Mail editorial “Mashatile’s hoods underscore ANC impunity” of July 5 on the widely shared video clip of members of deputy president Paul Mashatile’s security detail “brutally assaulting two motorists”.
One line craved outraged attention for its bald revelation: “A calculation by the DA in 2021 put the cost [of protection] at R8m per VIP. In today’s terms, that’s only 12,820 times the monthly food poverty line.”
Let that sink in, a terse comment on a state lording it over an immiserated society.
As Institute of Race Relations (IRR) colleague Hermann Pretorius said in a media release, such incidents “are symptomatic of an arrogant state that has been indulged with ever more power at the expense of individual freedom and, ultimately, human dignity”.
He’s right. For a start, in a civilised state, the deputy president would have resigned promptly, signalling his own and his government’s intolerance of any savage treatment of citizens. Except, the governing class has indeed been indulged.
Conduct of a higher order — which is not inappropriately classed as “civilised”, and we shouldn’t be squeamish about using that serviceable word — has much less to do with those who wield power than those who grant it.
It’s not a case of “they” and “them”, but “we” and “us”. Which is also a signal to ourselves to hesitate before deciding that civilisation is an endowment, something innate (for some, but not others, typically), which it isn’t. Civilisation, which is fragile, is the sum of our conduct, it is how we behave, day by day, especially when we succumb to the weaknesses of our humanity and make mistakes.
The worst corruption of these last years of our waning post-Liberation Era — and which we will have to work hard to expunge in the approaching Democratic Era — is the scale at which tolerating mistakes has been allowed to become ordinary and acceptable.
Unless something happened over the weekend, it is now 14 days since a member of the public with an instinctive sense of responsibility in the face of uncivilised conduct filmed the assault of civilians by members of the SA Police Service’s VIP unit and yet — in the words of DA shadow minister of police Andrew Whitfield in a statement on “the 10th day of no action” last week — not a single perpetrator has been arrested.
The least the rest of us can do is live up to Whitfield’s challenge: “Let it be unequivocally clear that this incident must not, under any circumstances, be allowed to fade into obscurity.”
That would be the profoundest corruption.
As the Financial Mail concluded: “These are not random acts of violence; they are the logical outcome of a lack of accountability and consequence that filters down from the very top of society. There is ... at least some chance that the thugs who protect Mashatile will see justice. Or wash, rinse, repeat.”
Morris is head of media at the SA Institute of Race Relations