PALI LEHOHLA | When victims victimise, healing is paramount — make it a Sustainable Development Goal

SA has become a strange country. The Zondo commission has revealed the depths of its ailment. Society has been numbed. Society has normalised the abnormal . A mother killing three of her children and killing herself because she cannot any longer face daily hunger is telling. Six-year-old Komape fell into a pit latrine and died when all he wanted was an education. Thirty-two people died after drinking contaminated water in Hammanskraal. Parliament is turning into a reality show. These are bad omens. We need healing now.

The world has become increasingly dangerous. While we have been spared a moment of a world war, the continual skirmishes, intercountry wars and coups d’etat add up to at least a world war.

Constant strife and consequent inequality, poverty and hunger suggest that the world is in a crisis that could escalate to a world war. Under such a scenario where technology has advanced to levels unprecedented, such a prospect promises an unwinnable war. The sophistication of weaponry and its destructive power leaves no-one protected.

The eight-decade strife between Palestine and Israel and its full-scale degeneration into a humanitarian disaster of huge proportions teaches us that being human is about learning from own experiences and changing our ways. For Israel as a government to do to Palestine what Germany as a government did to the Jews unravels an important observation that anchors the fundamental principles: victims can victimise.

My successor at Stats SA Risenga Maluleke was assigned to undertake a programme with Tukufu Zuberi of the University of Pennsylvania. Zuberi wanted to conclude the chapter of postcolonial Africa and his last station was to be SA. Tukufu and Maluleke would meet several political figures of SA. The issue of victims becoming victimisers was illustrated by the late Pik Botha. He was narrating the painful humiliation they suffered in the concentration camps under the British. In his rendition it was as though this just happened yesterday with him present. When Maluleke asked him, if you were so badly treated by the British, how come you treat those from whom you experienced no ill-treatment with such disdain and brutality? To that question Botha retreated to the treatment they got from the British in the concentration camps in Mahikeng and other places. The Anglo-Boer War and skirmishes between the two occurred at least more than three decades before the birth of Pik Botha. He did not see it, he did not experience it, but it lives in his blood and generations after him. Even then, the revenge was directed at black people, not the British. In similar ways we see Israel and the Jews directing their anger at the Palestinians and not the Germans. The victims can easily be the victimisers.

The irony is that the Covid-19 pandemic was more devastating among the rich. The US for instance with a per capita income of $40,000, compared to China with $10,000, which is a quarter of the US per capita had 140,000 deaths compared to China’s 10,000. This would mean the US had 14 times more deaths than China. If we factored in population, the US would experience a death rate 56 times that of China.

So what tilts the scale — wealth or health? Put more bluntly, are the accumulated riches of the individuals more important or the health of the nation?

The question is, what do health and wealth mean? Increasingly there is an emerging thought that affirms health as wealth. This thought is conclusively affirmed by the recent pandemic where many a wealthy people could not deploy their wealth to stop the pandemic from sending them to the grave. A lot more deaths were expected in the global south given their living conditions, yet per capita more deaths occurred in the north. Some argue that the differential in death rates was a result of age, whereby Covid-19 mortality for the elderly was much more pronounced. But on a weighted basis in income per capita and life expectancy, China emerged with a lower Covid-19 mortality rate. So has been the case in Africa, where income per capita is much lower, albeit the elderly are not as many.

So what tilts the scale — wealth or health? Put more bluntly, what is more important, the accumulated riches of the individuals or the health of the nation?

Amartya Sen in his capability approach to life observes: “Human lives are battered and diminished in all kinds of different ways, and the first task ... is to acknowledge that deprivations of very different kinds have to be accommodated within a general overarching framework.”

The world eight years ago adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in an attempt to manage the mission challenges that have been in our midst for almost a century. Disease and pestilence come often in spurts, such as the Spanish flu of 1918, and a century later another struck. Poverty and hunger have got the world’s attention with poverty and hunger taking on goals 1 and 2, health goal 3 and education goal 4. Gender equality is goal 5. And so on up to goal 17.

The base behaviour of retaliation whereby a victim becomes a victimiser rest very deep in the psych of at least the animal kingdom. It requires attention and deep healing to change behaviour.

This is an important point because this could be the most difficult part of the journey towards healing.

Basotho have a proverb that says, “ha e iphethetse ka e e hlabileng”; a goring among cattle leads to a chain reaction where the last one gores the one in front of it.

Victim becoming victimiser is a sad story of post-apartheid SA, where the so-called liberators have become modern-day oppressors with devastating moral dilemmas and tetralemma at three levels. First, fellow comrades who are not part of the ruling elite ask themselves, what informed those we put in power? Some of the old fellow comrades have no means of livelihood. To this end they ask themselves difficult questions of whether it was worth it. Second, the struggle gets infiltrated and further gets corrupted by those who never possessed any interest in the struggle but parade and sloganeer as liberators. This paralyses society. Third, and most dangerous, is a different culture distant from the notion of ubuntu that emerges which provides little by way of a future for the country. This is where we are as a country today. It is from this abyss that we should recover our senses.

To search for more ambition, healing should be elevated to a priority above poverty and hunger. People have to heal; the planet has to heal. In that respect the JET has opened space for atonement and remedy. Such remedy should consider the serious and more costly path of victims becoming future victimisers. To this end healing has become a supreme moral, social, judicial and economic objective that should be elevated to the status of a SDG. The challenge has taken on global proportions with our enjoined threat from Covid-19 and the ongoing geopolitical wars.

This is an edited version of a keynote address delivered at the 25th Anniversary of the Institute for Healing Memories in Durban on November 11.

Dr Pali Lehohla is the director of the Economic Modelling Academy, a Professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg, a research associate at Oxford University, a board member of Institute for Economic Justice at Wits and a distinguished Alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former statistician-general of SA.