TOM EATON | VIP protection thugs represent government’s deluded priorities

The footage of Paul Mashatile’s VIP police protection unit assaulting two prone, apparently unarmed citizens on a highway has caused uproar. It showed a clear abuse of power, gross incompetence, and almost certain criminality. But while it has made us angry and sick, I don’t think it has surprised anyone.

We all know that there are excellent people in SAPS; skilful, dedicated, even heroic officers doing what they can with the little they have. But when images like this fill the news, it’s too easy to see a decades-old pattern, coming to us almost unchanged from the poisonous heart of the apartheid regime.

I’m sure Bheki Cele would vehemently disagree, insisting that everything changed in 1994 and that SAPS is a completely different force. Perhaps it is. And yet even he would have to admit that those thugs on that highway belong to the same force that murdered Andries Tatane in cold blood in 2011 and, a year later, carried out the Marikana massacre.

They belong to the same force that killed Sibusiso Amos, Petrus Miggels and Adane Emmanuel during lockdown when it wasn’t beating citizens with sjamboks or spraying pensioners with water cannons.

Perhaps most enraging to most South Africans, they belong to the same force that continues to commit these crimes as actual criminals, both on the streets and boardrooms and parliament, romp free.

We are also wholly gatvol of blue light convoys. Almost 10 years ago I wrote a column about watching Jacob Zuma’s convoy racing into Cape Town for the opening of parliament, “bunched together like a phalanx of obese dung beetles jealously guarding a piece of shit somewhere in their midst”. People understood exactly what I was talking about because even then we’d had more than our fill of the violent arrogance of our political class and its enforcers.

Violence by the state against citizens doesn’t need to be an expensive boot against a frightened face. Often, it can simply be an inbox with 100 unread emails.

Inevitably, some commentators are once again asking why we are still haunted by those shitty dung beetles, and whether the R1.9bn we spend on them is justifiable.

They are good questions and big numbers, but I would suggest that we already have answers — that we’ve had answers for years — provided by some other figures.

R11bn, for example, is the amount SAPS budged in 2012 for paying civil claims filed against its violent, incompetent officers. R1.5bn is what SAPS paid between 2015 and 2020 merely for wrongful arrests.

Again, this isn’t everyone. Former VIP protection unit members have this week expressed their disgust over the footage, pointing out all the ways the officers acted unprofessionally and brutishly. But, with all due respect to the excellent service and unblemished records of those former officers, the scenes on that highway are the inevitable, logical conclusion of what happens when Paul Mashatile’s party runs a country for too long.

Police brutality is visceral, immediate, undeniable. But there are other ways to leave citizens dazed and traumatised, whether it be by denying them access to decent education, clean water, basic healthcare or simply wasting their taxes and protecting the corrupt; and Mashatile’s party does all of those, every single day. Violence by the state against citizens doesn’t need to be an expensive boot against a frightened face. Often, it can simply be an inbox with 100 unread emails.

On Tuesday, when Mmusi Maimane declared that “Paul Mashatile must personally pay for the medical expenses of those injured by his VIP protection team”, reactions on Twitter ranged from mild confusion to fury and derision, with some accusing him of trying to hijack the assault for political gain, while other, more sober commenters pointed out that politicians never pay for the misdeeds of police officers.

But that, I think, is the point. Perhaps I’m giving Maimane too much credit, but I think what he was trying to say, albeit clumsily, was that this country needs to start reconnecting cause with effect; understanding that if someone has power, that they automatically also have responsibility, and that responsibility only means anything if it comes with practical, personal inconveniences.

In 2011, Andries Tatane and his family paid the price for the incompetence, callousness and criminality of Mashatile’s party and all that it has wrought. During lockdown, Sibusiso Amos, Petrus Miggels and Adane Emmanuel paid. This week, it was those two motorists, albeit at a lesser price.

We are right to get angry. But until the majority of South Africans understand that politicians are public servants, not aristocrats, and we force them to experience personal inconvenience for public dysfunction or violence, we’ll keep getting angry. And the wrong people will keep paying.