Didiza of Tshwane: The face that launched a riot
#TshwaneUnrest. That’s the hashtag that South African twitter users chose to bookmark the biggest, most sustained public violence in the 22 years since the advent of democracy.
Unrest? It seems there’s nothing like a good euphemism to make one feel snug and safe in suburbia, while in the Pretoria townships feral rioters loot and burn.
Two dozen buses have been torched, to date five people have been killed, and barricades, rocks and burning tyres spewing toxic smoke have closed roads and freeways. Government departments, businesses and schools have shut to protect public servants, employees and children.
Yet we talk of unrest, a term that incidentally was also much used by the apartheid government to sugar coat what was a de facto uprising and civil war.
And as for the nation’s leader, the elusive President Jacob Zuma, well, Pretoria’s burning but he’s nowhere to be seen. Nor heard. Not a peep. He is perhaps waiting on the Gupta brothers for instructions on what to say.
Meanwhile, his lugubrious deputy, Cyril Ramaphosa, and ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe, share the task of keeping the nation reassured and being the lightning rods for anything that goes wrong. Thus far, they have not been doing a particularly good job of it.
Mantashe kicked off by flatly denying that the violence had anything to do with the side-lining of local mayoral candidates in Tshwane, to accommodate the deployment of Thoko Didiza. It was “thuggery”, said Mantashe and had “nothing to do with ANC members”.
This kind of arrogant proclamation of what the truth is, accompanied by an insistence that we, the people, should accept it even if is patently contradicted by the evidence before our eyes, is increasingly the way that the ANC operates. It is exactly the same arrogance that caused Luthuli House to think that they could parachute in Didiza and that the displaced networks of patronage and corruption affected would meekly stand back.
Barely had Mantashe uttered his absurd exculpation of ANC members, than State Security Minister David Mahlobo acknowledged‚ in an interview with Radio 702‚ that the protests were sparked by ANC members “who were not satisfied with the processes” of the party’s selection of Didiza.
Mantashe had to back peddle fast. Without skipping a beat he then went public to say that the ANC had the names and pictures of members of the party who had organised the violence. At the same time the Hawks said it was investigating whether senior ANC members were implicated and that arrests “will be made soon”.
But nothing has happened. So far no arrests have been made of any “senior ANC members”.
Maybe the Hawks should just read the newspapers. The Pretoria News this week carried a detailed report on how within hours of Didiza’s deployment being announced, a senior ANC official co-ordinated a meeting of “ANC branch leaders, ward councillors and candidates” in a local hotel, to plot how “to render the city ungovernable” and “turn it into a battlefield”, if their preferred mayoral candidate was not given the nod by Luthuli House.
So why the reluctance to act against the plotters of public violence? A cynic might point out that there has always been a reluctance to act against the ANC leadership when it comes to accusations of wrongdoing.
Having ANC membership is like having a real life version of the Cloak of Shadows from Warcraft, which instantly removes all harmful spells and cloaks the wearer in immunity. Ask Zuma. Ask Marius Fransman.
Or is it that the ANC in Tshwane is so corrupt and fragmented that to act against popular leaders would spark even greater public violence? The police, poorly led and poorly trained, has struggled as it is, to cope.
In any case, one doubts that the Hawks would have been so slow to act, had the plotters of this week’s chaos been members of the EFF. Or a bunch of whities from the Freedom Front Plus.
Didiza must be wondering how she offended the gods to be handed this poisoned chalice with the expectation that she will save the ANC from defeat in the August local government elections.
Poor woman. Helen of Troy had the face that reputedly launched a thousand ships. Didiza of Tshwane has the face that launched a riot. Follow WSM on Twitter @ TheJaundicedEye