Unequal South Africa: Peace an expensive compromise
GLOBAL lenses are glued on South Africa — the supposedly Rainbow Nation — a conundrum that is paradoxically Africa’s economic powerhouse yet also carrying the unflattering tag of being the most unequal nation in the world.
Apartheid, which purportedly was defeated in 1994 when Uhuru dawned on the said rainbow nation, which conspicuously doesn’t have black colour, remains alive in the images that persistently assault screens the world over.
The picture that stares one back is that of a people miserably eking out a living on the periphery of human existence; of a country living in denial of the reality that no freedom exists without ownership of the land, for everything stems from its bowels. Figures do not lie.
In South Africa, 84 percent of the land is still in the hands of the beneficiaries of apartheid, with only 13 percent controlled by the government on behalf of the black majority whose population is close to 60 million, and one percent is not clearly accounted for.
Michael Fargher, a South African, says that the glaring inequality in the country, “has not arisen as the result of chance. Instead, we can identify the unjust acts under apartheid and colonisation that specifically engineered the repression and robbery of black people in our society.”
Hence, the corruption and poverty bedevilling Africa today, pertinently South Africa, are rooted in colonialism and its apparatus for pilferage and brutality. It is not merely the responsibility of leaders of the postcolonial state.
Peace, which is increasingly eluding the rainbow nation and other parts of the world, does not come cheap.
It is an expensive compromise that recognises the existence of diversity without necessarily gouging out each other’s eyes. Such a compromise is steeped in the land as a mother to all, equally offering the tangibles and intangibles in its belly.
There is a price to pay after all, for the land is as contentious as it is finite. It has always been like that — liberation struggles across Africa and beyond found fervour in it — well-intentioned and weaker nations
have been vilified for reclaiming it.
Yet, the Zimbabwean story remains resilient, and peace has not been elusive. One only has to look at the fires consuming South Africa, a combustible bed of unfulfilled expectations, to appreciate the value of peace.
Cognisant of the essence of peace on any nation’s prosperity as an attractive cog to the stability and security that appeals to investors, Zimbabweans continue to shun violence.
There is so much to cherish and hold on to.
It may be so that South Africa’s Constitutional Court caged former president Jacob Zuma for 15 months, a sentence which split public opinion, even yonder the country’s borders, but it remains debatable that the protests are about his incarceration.
It only ignited a bonfire whose fuel and firewood were already set up. It was bound to be kindled one way or the other. Probably, Professor Lovemore Madhuku put it succinctly when he said: “We are not in South Africa. We are observing from afar.
“You get a distinct impression that there is a well-calculated approach to use (former) President Jacob Zuma to demonstrate some exaggerated notion of the rule of law in South Africa; that we are the best country in Africa; we follow the rule of law; we send our former Presidents to prison. That’s nonsense”.
It is hard to imagine how blacks in an independent African country, releasing their pent-up anger after centuries of living on the economic fringes of the Motherland, could be racially profiled, beaten up, and butchered by vigilante white goons.
Peace-loving Zimbabweans would vouch that such a show of misplaced bravado would never happen under their watch.
Instead of containing the protests,
this callous show of racial supremacy only serves to accentuate feelings of marginalisation that run deep in South Africa, with the rich getting richer while the poor find themselves worse off than they were in 1994.
Spurned by the rainbow owing to their colour — black — South Africans on the wrong side of the colour bar, feel short-changed. The pie chart representing assets, education, skills, employment opportunities and remunerations are skewed in their disfavour.
Clearly, the inequities that were papered over, run deeper and far beyond the incarceration of former president Zuma, who now stands as a symbol of hope for his compatriots; still physically, emotionally, psychologically and mentally jailed in apartheid prisons.
Little wonder why South Africans are revolting. They have been holding on to their anger for long. Now all the bottled ire has found an outlet. The protests are simply an expression of that anger, that alienation.
A recent report by the World Bank recognised South Africa as the most unequal country in the world, meaning that the Southern African powerhouse’s economy does not equally benefit all its citizens.
According to the report, the richest 20 percent in South Africa, largely representing white monopoly capital, controls almost 70 percent of the country’s resources.
Another recent report by Oxfam also established that the average white executive earns the same as 461 black women combined.
There really is no need to spin facts here; black South Africans are foreigners in their motherland. It is just another country in which they hold neither sway nor say.
Perhaps South Africans have now found the oomph to uproot themselves from their assumed positions, sacrificing peace in the process. They may just have come of age.
It is beyond imagination for vigilante groups in Zimbabwe to hunt and hurt civilian citizens for purposes of maintaining and upholding the rule of law, which is well-guaranteed by the country’s security apparatus, including the army.
The reading is clear on the wall that the continent’s detractors and their lapdogs should be enlightened on the sanctity of sovereignty.
South Africa is set to call-up 25 000 reservists for the first time in decades to quell the disturbances. This should be a lesson to naysayers that sovereign countries are duty-bound to employ any form of tactic to preserve peace and secure lives.
Lives cannot keep on being lost across the Limpopo.
In Zimbabwe, human life remains sacrosanct, for the rule of law is observed in spirit and truth, no matter what cynics say.
Zimbabweans do not only cherish the prevailing peace they enjoy, but also ownership of the means of production; their ancestral land and heritage. Now that estimates put losses in Durban, the epicentre of the protests at more than R15 billion, with food shortages already being felt, the quintessence of peace cannot be overemphasised.
Of course it is unAfrican to gloat over a brother’s misfortune, but time has come for South Africans to introspect and tackle racial inequalities that persist in their midst, which if allowed to fester could threaten the peace and tranquillity in the region.
For it is a fact that the country offers several arterial roads that serve the north-south corridor and for regional sake, and that of our brothers we hope for a speedy and peaceful resolution.