News & Views No. 14 Diarmuid Breatnach
(Reading time: 6 mins.)
We need to be careful when elevating people from our ranks to the status of heroes – especially if they are alive and can renounce or betray the principles they originally fought for.1
And we have the right to be suspicious when those heroes are also acclaimed by the capitalists and imperialists, those who are certainly not our friends. But most of all, it is by their fruits that we can best evaluate people, whatever their past actions.
The society bequeathed after years of heroic struggle to the South African masses is broken. Housing and homelessness crisis,2 unemployment, poverty,3 prostitution, lack of medical care, inadequate sanitation and soaring crime, including violent crime – is not what the people fought for.
And this is occurring in a country rich in natural resources4 which are being extracted daily by imperialism, while the few on top — the earlier white settler bosses now joined by the corrupt black bourgeoisie – live in luxury.
CRIME & POLICING
Anton Koen, a former police officer who now runs a private security firm that specialises in tracking and recovering hijacked and stolen vehicles believes that “It’s not getting better, it is getting worse”, with the murder rate the highest it’s been in 20 years.
In crime-ridden societies, the poor suffer the most and are of course also recruited into crime.
There were 27,494 killings in South Africa in the year to February 2023, compared with 16,213 in 2012-2013. South Africa’s homicide rate in 2022-2023 was 45 per 100,000 people, compared with a rate of 6.3 in the US and around one in most European countries.
Those who can afford it, hire private security, which is a booming business with South Africa’s security industry — one of the largest in the world, with more than 2.7 million registered private security officers registered in the country, according to the regulating agency, the PSIRA.5
“People with money make up a very small percentage of South Africa, said Chad Thomas, an organised crime expert who has worked more than 30 years in police work and now in private security.6
“That means that the vast majority of South Africans don’t really benefit from this security industry … If you live in a traditional township environment, or if you live in an informal settlement …7 security patrols in those areas are few and far between because they don’t have paying customers.”
Thomas, like many, ties the high levels of violent crime in South Africa to anger over the country’s deep problems of poverty.8
Private security companies are paid a monthly fee to patrol neighbourhoods and for providing armed response to their clients’ alarm systems. Tracking and car recovery can be part of the service, often resulting in getting involved in high-speed chases of car thieves and hijackers.
According to the PSIRA, the number of security businesses in South Africa grew by 43 per cent in the past decade, while the number of registered security officers has increased by 44 per cent. Meanwhile there are 150,000 police officers for the country’s 62 million people.
It is hardly surprising that the SA police force has difficulty in recruiting numbers. It is a force used to violently repress people9 and culpable in the worst massacre of working people in South Africa’s modern history, killing 40 striking miners over a couple of days.
That slaughter occurred in 2012 at the British-owned Lonmin platinum mine in Marikana, when miners wished create a new union and to leave the National Union of Mineworkers which, they said, was more in favour of their employers than the workers.10
Cyril Ramaphosa, the millionaire ex-President of the NUM was widely suspected of having organised the massacre and he’s now President of the ANC and of the South African Government. At the time, Jacob Zuma was President, now in the process of being tried for financial corruption.
But Mandela was still alive and at liberty when the massacre occurred and did not condemn the atrocity nor those responsible. Long-time anti-apartheid campaigner (and Mandela’s friend) Bishop Tutu once famously commented that “The ANC stopped the gravy train – long enough to get on it.”11
IMPORTANT
Is it important whether this person or that were truly the heroes they are reputed to have been? I think it is, not only because we tend to erect them as models for our behaviour but also because their lives and their choices present us with historical lessons.
The South African regime during the struggle was a white European settler state and like all of those, undemocratic and racist too. The masses rose up several times against it but people did not risk beatings, torture, imprisonment and death merely for the right to vote.
The struggles were so strong and the minority settler regime so emphatically opposed to reforms that its imperialist partners felt it vulnerable to revolution. They eventually convinced the regime to enfranchise the majority black population.
But what if the black masses went on kick out the imperialists?
The change had to be managed and the leadership of the ANC, the NUM and the Communist Party of South Africa proved willing to control their supporters. However, something else was needed, as in similar circumstances: a known face, a hero, to be the figurehead before the masses.
Mandela proved to be that man, not only for his long imprisonment for guerrilla action but because he had been tested among the political prisoners on Roben Island and was judged the most suitable, so he had been separated from the other political prisoners to a new jail for grooming.
Mandela, after a huge publicity buildup around the world, was released in 1990 and began a series of negotiations with the settler minority’s leadership. In 1994, with universal suffrage, Mandela was easily elected head of the ANC and of the new government of South Africa.
Of the wave of pacification processes that swept around the world starting in the very early 90s with Al Fatah in Palestine, the South African process turned out to be the only one that delivered any of the objectives of what was promised12 — and that was the vote for everyone.
But it had the potential beyond that gain: of national liberation, the possession of all its natural resources and of a progressive social order, a beacon for the rest of Africa. It was important for imperialism to prevent all that and, with the help of the leaders of the ANC, NUM and CPSA, they did so.
The immediate result was a drop even further in the standard of living of the masses and an increase in the rapacious grip of imperialism on the natural resources, while municipal services declined further and crime at the bottom took off, matching corruption at the top.
The broken society there now is the cumulative result and should serve as a lesson about pacification processes, negotiations during struggle and our choices of heroes – or those chosen for us.
End.
FOOTNOTES
1As we in Ireland can testify, with the lionisation of Michael Collins, for example, for his role in the War of Independence (1919-1921) but who, a little later, acted on behalf of the Irish colonial bourgeoisie and their British masters to launch the Civil War (1922-1923) to prevent the establishment of a 32-County Republic.
2https://www.monitor.co.ug/uganda/news/fire-engulfs-illegal-housing-block-killing-73-in-south-africa-4353926
3 As of 2023, around 18.2 million people in South Africa are living in extreme poverty, with the poverty threshold at1.90 U.S. dollars daily (see Statista in Sources & References).
4See Sources & References
5The Private Security Industry Regulatory Agency.
6https://www.breakingnews.ie/world/private-security-firms-fill-void-in-crime-riddled-south-africa-1572546.html
7Ibid.
8Ibid.
9For examples see series of articles in https://www.saferspaces.org.za/understand/entry/police-brutality-in-south-africa
10It was notable that those popular organisations deeply implicated in pacification processes either reported with great restraint on the massacre or failed, like the Left-Nationalist Basque trade union LAB, to comment on it at all (to say nothing of sending a solidarity message to the striking workers or denouncing the State).
11https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/anc-boards-the-gravy-train-john-carlin-in-johannesburg-on-the-underdogs-who-have-become-fat-cats-in-a-few-months-1379001.html
12For example Palestine, Ireland, the Basque Country, Turkish Kurdistan, Colombia, Sri Lanka …
SOURCES & REFERENCES
Crime and private security firms: https://www.breakingnews.ie/world/private-security-firms-fill-void-in-crime-riddled-south-africa-1572546.html
SA police: https://www.saferspaces.org.za/understand/entry/police-brutality-in-south-africa
SA Housing: https://rebelbreeze.com/2023/09/30/pacification-kills-too/
SA Poverty: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1263290/number-of-people-living-in-extreme-poverty-in-south-africa
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