Mahlobo’s Rubicon
Who recognises the following quote? “Our enemies — both within and without — seek to divide our peoples. They seek to create unbridgeable differences between us to prevent us from negotiating peaceful solutions to our problems.”
And who remembers this one: “The tragedy is that hostile pressure and agitation from abroad have acted as an encouragement to militant revolutionaries in SA.”
The quotes are from then state president PW Botha’s 1985 “Rubicon” speech, the one that caused a flight of capital from SA and a collapse in the rand.
The speech was a disappointment because there had been speculation that Botha would announce big changes. But the narrative and the style were pretty typical for that period of the “total onslaught”. It was a period in which the blame for domestic uprisings against apartheid was frequently placed on hostile foreign forces, providing a justification for increasingly authoritarian measures such as the state of emergency, which was declared in 1985. It was a period, too, in which Botha’s state security council, rather than the Cabinet, increasingly called the shots on policy.
It was a long time ago and one would like to think it was in a country far, far away from the one we have now. Yet reports at the weekend indicated that the views in a draft document prepared for the ANC’s June policy conference are not a million miles away from the kind of narrative that Botha and his total onslaught team used to peddle.
And comments on Sunday by State Security Minister David Mahlobo sounded at times eerily like the state security folk of the total onslaught era. The ANC document, according to a Sunday Times report, accuses unnamed foreign intelligence agencies of working with “negative domestic forces” to undermine the state and achieve regime change. Those domestic forces are said to include various nongovernmental and community organisations and, of course, the media — always a target of paranoid politicians with an appetite for authoritarian rule. The media made a cameo appearance in Botha’s Rubicon speech when he asked why the media was always present, “with cameras et cetera” at places where violence took place. “Are there people from the revolutionary elements who inform them to be ready? Or are there perhaps representatives of the reactionary groups in the ranks of certain media?”
Mahlobo’s comments to the effect that the courts and the media were being abused by forces aiming to undermine the state was bizarrely reminiscent of the “total onslaught” era.
He talked about regulating social media and the internet — something only undemocratic China has attempted.
And he referred to people running to the courts on political matters to undermine decisions taken by the government. It was not clear whether he was speaking about the DA or Freedom Under Law or Corruption Watch or the Helen Suzman Foundation or any of the various civil society organisations that have used the courts to great effect to hold SA to its own constitutional principles.
If he was, we should all be very concerned. The courts have been a crucial bulwark against the abuse of power in SA and, the contribution of civil society litigants to sustaining and defending SA’s democracy through the courts cannot be underestimated.
Of course, the world is indeed an unstable place, as the minister said, and the threat of terror is ever present.
Mahlobo and his colleagues do need to protect SA from genuine terror threats. But they have little chance of doing that sensibly if they confuse legitimate domestic protest against unemployment or poor education or corruption with imagined foreign incursions.
THE MINISTER REFERRED TO PEOPLE RUNNING TO THE COURTS ON POLITICAL MATTERS