Mobilisation needed against killings

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KWAZULU-NATAL is the epicentre of political killings in South Africa. One study has concluded that more than 90% of the documented political killings since 1994 have happened in this province.

There is no clear figure for the number of people murdered in political killings in the province since 1994. But a widely cited study by respected researcher, and former political prisoner, David Bruce, recorded more than 450 political killings in the province between 1994 and 2014. Recent reports have put the number of political killings since 2014 as 89, to total more than 500.

All observers seem to agree that the prevalence of political violence in the province goes back to the 10-year civil war between Inkatha and the ANC. The war claimed the lives of some 20 000 people, and displaced tens of thousands of others.

After apartheid, inter-party conflict continued to drive political violence. There was conflict between the ANC and the IFP, and then between both parties and the IFP breakaway the NFP. Left-wing organisations such as the SACP, Numsa and Abahlali basemjondolo have also been subject to assassinations.

But the bulk of the murders currently happening are intra-anc and are widely understood to be driven by competition for patronage rather than ideology.

Corruption and state capture have placed terrible burdens on our society. Every rand that ends up in a Gupta account in Dubai is a rand that could have been spent on education, housing, health care and so on.

The media, civil society and opposition parties have been correct to direct so much critical attention to this problem.

But political killings have not been afforded the same attention. In fact, they are hardly spoken about in elite circles. The ratio of articles on corruption to those on political killings in a publication like The Daily Maverick or Business Day is probably significantly less than 1:100.

This is very unfortunate. Political violence, rather than corruption, is the greatest threat to our democracy.

Already we can see that political violence is moving out of Kwazulunatal and into other provinces, and that it, and the general thuggery associated with it, is starting to affect elite actors.

The death threats against Makhosi Khoza are a clear indication of the escalation of the crisis.

The year 2008 is often said to have been a turning point in our democracy. This was the year in which Julius Malema and Zwelinzima Vavi both announced their willingness to kill for Zuma.

No democracy can countenance these kinds of utterances. The fact that both men continue to have significant positions of authority is clear evidence that we, as a society, do not take democracy seriously.

The fact that five years after the Marikana massacre no-one has been arrested for the murders of the striking miners is another indication that while we may have elections, a Parliament and a constitution, we are not, in the full meaning of the term, a democracy.

The Moerane commission is the first indication that anyone in government is taking this problem seriously. It emerges from factional politics in the ANC and will be seen by many as a weapon in those politics. Despite this, the commission has already been very effective insofar as it has turned the media spotlight on to the problem of political killings. This in itself is a significant breakthrough. For this we owe the premier a debt of gratitude.

The question though is what comes next? Some of the suggestions to the commission have been entirely unhelpful. For instance, Paulus Zulu suggested that, in a shockingly antidemocratic move, only people with a certain level of education should be eligible for certain forms of elected office.

But one useful suggestion, made by a number of witnesses, is that the policing and prosecution of political killings must be taken out of the hands of local actors.

Experts must be brought in from elsewhere in the country, or even elsewhere in the world, and be given the financial and political support that they need to undertake their work without fear or favour.

This was the strategy used with some success in the 1990s and it is clear we need to return to it now. But if the commission does make a recommendation along these lines there is a real question as to whether or not there will be the political will to enforce it.

The National Prosecuting Authority and the public protector’s office continue to exist on paper but have lost all credibility as independent institutions.

In this context, it is not at all clear that any recommendations from the commission will be seriously implemented.

Our best hope for creating the kind of political pressure that can force action on this matter is through popular mobilisation.

As Raymond Suttner recently argued: “There is a growing sense that politics does not end in electoral processes.”

This is a healthy return to the notions that drove many people in the 1980s, (Well expressed in a statement by UDF leader Murphy Morobe in 1987 and the writing of Michael Neocosmos among others).

The best possibility for creating the kind of mass support for a challenge to the normalisation of political killings seems to lie in a broad alliance of dissident forces in the ANC, the SACP, the new trade union federation, Abahlali basemjondolo and various independent actors, like religious leaders and critical intellectuals.

But bringing this kind of alliance together will not be easy. There are all kinds of divisions to overcome and doing so would require a credible and principled actor, or set of actors, to facilitate the process.

Without this kind of unity, which can create real pressure from below, the recommendations of the commission, no matter how carefully thought through, are unlikely to make much difference.

As was noted this week, the real questions that confront us in this moment of crisis are political, not technical.

We urgently need to create the political forces that can set us on a new path.

Buccus is senior research associate at the Aliwal Social Research Institute, research fellow in UKZN’S School of Social Sciences and academic director of a university study abroad programme on political transformation. He promotes #Reading Revolution via Books@antique at Antique Café in Morningside, Durban.