Business Day March 3, 2008
March 18, 2008
BUSINESS DAY ARTICLE MARCH 3, 2008
By Benjamin Trisk
Without faces or names; with neither spine nor heart; unseen and uncaring - these now are the people with power over our children. The blood of parents washes the feet of the young. Who is there left to care for us? South Africans can no longer care for themselves.
Eighteen months ago I wrote in this newspaper that armed men in our house had robbed my son of his childhood. Eighteen months later it has become a most trivial incident. This week I am reminded how trivial: the Lapp family live in Parktown North. They too were involved in the end of weekend routine of marshalling children for school; forcing them into readiness; asking their son if his kit was prepared for rugby or hockey trials ahead of a new season. I don’t know the family, I wasn’t at the house. But we all know the drill.
Nothing in their experience, or mine, or yours, might have prepared them for the onslaught to come. Armed men fortified with the knowledge of an incompetent police force and a crumbling justice system, secured by dope or arrogance (it matters not) burgled an urban life. They killed the father: his son and his wife are critically injured.
Regrettably, it is often only proximity that spurs us to action. We cannot raise ourselves to outrage every time death in this country takes on the all too frequent garb of an obscenity.Is this any more outrageous than the murder a month ago of Sheldon Cohen or Emily Williams – or other murders that were reported as common-place over the weekend.
Certainly not.
Five hundred years ago we were reminded that “no man is an island….any man’s death diminishes me..” But in this instance I am pricked by the knowledge of my own family’s good fortune. Moreover, my son and the young Lapp attend the same school although in different grades. So I know their routine and ours last Sunday night could not have been too different.
We are a nation dying from the pornography of crime.
And yet, even so, something has been sucked out of South Africans: it is our ability to respond in a sustained way to the travesty that parades itself as national politics. We have an inability to confront the malignant voice of a regime that, having occupied the moral high-ground, now sustains itself (and feeds its adherents both philosophically and by manipulation of the economic system) with cries of racism at every turn. In truth, politics today is no less racist than it was twenty years ago; excepting that it is allied to a monumental incompetence in respect of service delivery that harms black and white alike.
The Visigoths fatten – civilized people do nothing. They shrug helplessly at a country of tears and they act in their own interest; which thus far is to shore up their domestic defences or, increasingly again, emigrate. The international community is unconcerned, we hear no voice joining our trading partners in condemnation; and even if we did our leaders have no ears to listen. The most immediate issue on the mind of the President of France, in the great tradition of French venality, is to sell power generation capacity to this country.
And yet the People are never helpless. In 1960, during the course of the Treason Trial, the Apartheid government under Verwoerd, implemented a State of Emergency. The defence team for the accused were denied access to their clients during this period. As a result both the lawyers and their clients agreed that it was impossible to continue with a formal legal defence. The proceedings became a mockery. The defence continued to keep a watching brief in court but the accused enjoyed themselves by conducting their own defence and deliberately making the proceedings trivial and inconsequential. This took place in full view of a watching international community. Once the State of Emergency was lifted the defence team returned to give their clients proper succour. The outcome in 1961 was an acquittal for all the accused, who numbered Mr Mandela among them.
If men of great stature, accused and defence alike, could act together to defy an unworkable system, why should it be impossible for the Parliamentary opposition to signal its concern that the South African political corpus is sick and likely to become terminal. Take conventional opposition politics out of it; forget about the trite nonsense of oaths of allegiance for school children, and the drivel spoken by the Chairman of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Sport. Forget that stuff, as irritating as it may be.
Let the opposition step back a moment: the President-in-waiting faces serious charges around criminal conduct, ditto the former Chief of Police. We are led to believe from affidavits that the President may, at the very least, have misled the country about his knowledge of the Police Chief’s conduct. The only independent investigative and prosecutorial arm of the judiciary is to be dismembered and reorganized and the National Executive Committee of the ruling party includes individuals who have faced or been charged with (and found guilty) of criminal conduct Incompetence is no reason to dismiss a Cabinet Minister and no politician has even faced censure over the Eskom debacle.
Meanwhile the citizens of this country die from violent criminal acts every day – in their homes, at their places of work, in the street. Being a child brings no immunity and the deaths of our children inure others to the enormity of the loss.
This right now is our society: sick doesn’t begin to describe our plight.
There are no doubt obstacles, but if Zille, de Lille and Holomisa et al could convince their constituencies, the correct approach right now (with respect) is to announce an Opposition withdrawal from participation in parliament and a set of non-partisan guidelines for return. I would not presume to comment on the nature of a set of non-partisan principles but I would guess that issues around mandatory sentencing would be one of them. For my own part I am no longer opposed to the death sentence for certain crimes.
An Opposition consensus on withdrawal (and implementation) would most certainly galvanise world opinion on the affront that our current regime represents to civilized behaviour.
There also can no longer be any argument that this country deserves to stage the 2010 World Cup; our own leaders by their very conduct have given away our claim to represent a new African era. They have shamed us by their deceit and their greed. By their inaction and indifference they have frittered away the birthright of our children. By their adherence to the politics of race and denial they have wrung from our hearts the optimism and hope we won in 1994.
South Africa is run by men behind masks whose currency is the barrel of a gun. The politics of arrogance allows them free reign.
Have we reached the end of hope?
Benjamin Trisk
March 3, 2008
