JUSTICE MALALA | SA consumers turn to TV shows for answers and actions when the state fails them

The people of South Africa have been abandoned by their government. 

Everywhere you look, the government has lost relevance to the needs of the people. Where citizens need protection from unscrupulous religious shysters like the now-departed Timothy Omotoso, the state fails them. When citizens need protection against gangsters, as happens in the Cape Flats, the state fails them. When citizens need protection from civil servants who do not do their jobs and pocket taxpayers’ money, the state fails them. 

The story of South Africa since 2009 is the story of a civil service which is so busy looting that it has abandoned its primary duty: to serve the people. They are on their own. 

In Johannesburg, or in Hammanskraal, citizens go for hours or days without running water. In the Cape Flats or in Soshanguve, the police turn up at a crime scene hours or days after a call. The state has retreated. 

Whenever I tell one of my middle-class friends that I watched something on the popular channel Moja Love on DStv, they get into a huff. They allege that the channel is an exploitation of black suffering and poverty. They quote Steve Biko at me: black man, love yourself. They tell me that much of what is shown on Moja Love denigrates blackness and adds to the woes of our communities and our society. 

“Why,” one highly respected businessman asked me, “don’t you see the same kind of content about the Afrikaner community?” 

I disagree. Many of the channel’s shows reflect the retreat of the state and its failure to deliver to citizens. The fare on the channel is interesting. On a Sunday evening my mother and I watched a show in which a former actor helps parents deal with wayward children addicted to drugs, another in which the host tracks down drug dealers, a consumer ninja type of show, another focusing on alleged illegal immigrants, and several others.

X Repo, for example, is an extremely popular show in which the energetic host helps frustrated consumers get their belongings or money back from unethical car dealerships, mechanics (mainly) and other types of shady businesses and individuals. Why go to this TV show for help? Ordinary people should be able to get help on issues like these from the authorities: police, consumer bodies and the like. They don’t. So they turn to X Repo. 

Then there is the scourge of drugs. You have no idea how widespread and how deep the drug problem that now grips ordinary South African communities is. It’s everywhere and it’s turning communities into fearful zones: mothers and grandmothers are perpetually afraid of their addicted children, who steal and maraud to feed their habit. Social workers, police, the courts — they have all failed these communities. 

Perhaps the most popular show on Moja Love is Sizok’thola (“We will find/catch you”), in which the host literally tracks down drug dealers, catches them on camera and hands them over to the police with their wares. I pointed out to a friend in Hammanskraal that this show had been in trouble with the police after an alleged drug dealer apparently died in its custody. My friend dismissed the story outright. “Where were the cops in the first place to arrest the drug dealer?”

There are seeds of a popular, populist, movement here. I see Gayton McKenzie’s type of politics in some of the shows. I see his kind of energy

Sizok’thola is more trusted in communities than the police, who are seen as corrupt and in cahoots with drug dealers. 

There is a show that tracks down and arrests “illegal foreigners”. When I asked several people how they would feel if they were wrongfully arrested by this show, they shot back: “Why aren’t the police there to stop the flow of illegal foreigners into South Africa?” 

In the Tshwane Central Business District, there are bogus doctors performing all sorts of medical procedures on women desperate to get thin, light skinned, or fix some or other perceived deformity. The Moja Love team raided the place. Where were the Tshwane Metro Police — the people who are supposed to uphold bylaws in the city? 

And so it goes. 

Nature abhors a vacuum. In a country where a sick citizen must wait a whole day for medication at government hospitals, where calls to the police elicit no response, where the state has retreated, where civil servants refuse to do their jobs, the hosts of the shows on Moja Love are heroes. They remind people that problems can be solved — even in dodgy ways — where there is determination and will. 

Politically this should strike fear into the hearts of our leaders. People are seeing an alternative to the way things are. They see problems being solved by these programmes. And people applaud. They see results where the state never has any. 

There are seeds of a popular, populist, movement here. I see Gayton McKenzie’s type of politics in some of the shows. I see his kind of energy. And I think: the year 2029 and its election could very well belong to these small but growing “can do” shows and hosts. Or to vigilantism.