If you steal a painting in SA, you go to jail for 15 years. If you happen to be near a protest in Braamfontein over student funding, there is a real chance you will be killed by the police. But loot a country or collapse a company such as Steinhoff and wipe out thousands of pensions, well, in the increasingly hollow words of our president: watch this space.
There is something in the volume, shallowness and flightiness of the news cycle that often acts as a kind of shock-absorber. The constant noise prevents us from hearing distant screams. By focusing on Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, or Elon Musk’s latest theoretical net worth, or some Twitter feud between two mid-sized guppies in our tiny national fishbowl, we protect ourselves from having to read about the stuff that keeps scientists and honest police officers and investigative journalists up at night.
Sometimes, however, the news forces its way through.
On Wednesday morning it was business as usual. Transport minister Fikile Mbalula was in the headlines, pretending to be a real politician rather than a windsock with a Twitter account and no shame.
It was the normal infantile stool-water. Mbalula had insulted cooperative governance and traditional affairs (Cogta) minister Nkosazana Dlamini- Zuma on Twitter, had clearly been told to apologise and was now hauling himself up onto a pile of firewood and strapping himself to his favourite stake to do what the ANC does best when it’s crapped the bed: pretend to be a martyr.
But then two new stories broke.
When did it become so entirely normal in post-apartheid SA for police crowd-control operations to result in civilian deaths? How many innocent citizens, exactly, need to be murdered by police before Bheki Cele is forced to resign in disgrace?
ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule’s former driver had been sentenced to 15 years for stealing a Pierneef from the former premier’s office.
During a protest by Wits students in Braamfontein, a passer-by had apparently been shot by police, probably with a rubber bullet, and had died.
And suddenly I couldn’t care less what Mbalula thought about anything. I didn’t care about Meghan and Harry, and I certainly didn’t care about which DJ is feuding with which rapper.
All I could think was: when did it become so entirely normal in postapartheid SA for police crowd-control operations to result in civilian deaths? How many innocent citizens, exactly, need to be murdered by police before Bheki Cele is forced to resign in disgrace?
And for how much longer will we respect law and order when it is starting to feel so feudal; where stealing a painting gets you what may turn out to be a death sentence, while the office out of which the painting was stolen remains largely unvisited by any real consequences?
At what point will the electorate demand an end to this callous barbarism? Because until people such as Mbalula, Cele and Magashule face the real possibility of being fired or worse, rather than continuing to bask in sheltered employment, we’re going to wear out those shock-absorbers awfully quickly.
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