We are truly united at last for the wrong reason

ONE of the more interesting aspects of the aptly named State of Disaster is that a significant number of whiteys have been klapped by the cops, roughed up and abused by the soldiers, and told by the a ******* bureaucrats where, when and how they should conduct daily life.

That’s a new experience for us whiteys but it was, of course, an everpresent reality of black South Africans for generations. Democracy in 1994 was supposed to make us all equal on this score by ending gratuitous state violence, but it hasn’t quite worked out like that.

The middle-class – of which whites incidentally form a steadily decreasing proportion – lives a reality that is substantially different from that of the mostly black poor. They have been spared the indignities and abuses that are still today visited upon the indigent and consequently have been able to indulge a political apathy that gives space for bad governance to thrive.

Wealth is truly colour blind. No matter how despised one’s ethnicity, to have money is to have some insulation against the harsh edges of a poorly trained and incompetent police force, a thuggish and ill-disciplined military, and an indolent public service.

But with lockdown, the mask of benign governance has dropped. The state’s visceral tendencies towards control and authoritarianism have slipped into suburbia, slid past the booms of gated estates.

This has had the salutary effect of sparking some resistance. The people – perhaps for the first time, all the people – are gatvol. And they’re doing the one thing that any government should be terrified of: they are en masse simply ignoring the law.

That is why when President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that lockdown would ratchet down another notch, it was greeted with a yawn.

Most South Africans had already moved straight from level 5 to level 0 and were merely curious as to when government would catch up.

After all, in much of the country lockdown never happened in the first place. In cheek-to-jowl shacks and small homes with extended families, far from where the few who are employed actually work, isolation was always going to be impossible.

Effective lockdown has been largely a suburban experience, initially selfenforced by a people who understood and agreed with the policy. And when the middle-classes eventually got a little uppity about wanting to surf or walk their dogs, footage of burly police officers trying to drag an “arrested” toddler from its father’s arms or a solitary jogger manhandled weeping into a patrol van, would quickly have restored obedience.

But regulatory pettiness and ministerial heavy handedness has squandered that co-operation. At best, there is now a surly and waning compliance.

Contrary to the research council’s assertion that 88% of smokers have been unable to buy cigarettes, there’s not a smoker that I know of who has been deterred from getting illegal tobacco. The same with alcohol.

The black market tobacco industry was already established before the ban. It is now thriving, with expensive, low-quality products. When the ban is lifted, the illegal sellers will, with the advantage of improved distribution channels, switch to better-quality products priced more cheaply than the highly-taxed legal ones. The victims of this triumph of free enterprise will be the exchequer and the rule of law.

Booze bootleggers are less likely to survive. Unless cross-border smugglers can bring in recognised brands at a lower cost than the off-the-shelf bottle store offerings, the alcohol black market is a temporary phenomenon.

And the government must be praying that the two-fingered salute it’s getting from much of the populace is going to be, similarly, a temporary phenomenon. No government can indefinitely contain a sustained and widespread public antipathy.

So, kudos to Ramaphosa’s administration. Through hubris and a continuing stream of stupid regulations, the ANC has in just two months turned millions of habitually law-abiding South Africans into rebels and criminals.

Forget the 1994 schmaltz about South Africa and the rainbow people of God. It is only now that we are at last united as a nation, as one learning to channel our inner anarchist.