Let rule of law reign supreme
LAST week a young man was dragged screaming and kicking through the streets by a group of enraged women. Oh no, Khayelitsha has gone back to kangaroo justice, you may wail. But no, this time it took place in Protea South, Soweto.
Publicly shamed and harangued, the young man was being taken to the offices of the local community police forum, along with his three alleged accomplices.
Someone picked up a stone and threw it at him. That act was a catharsis for the group. Many others picked up stones and pelted him, until he was dead.
It was an awful end, a punishment of extreme severity.
The young man’s crime was almost banal, though it’s not the act that got him killed by the mob, but rather the context.
The suburb is drowning under a nyaope crime wave. The addicts steal to feed their cravings – and they couldn’t care less what is destroyed or whose rights are trampled on in the process.
The community’s problem is not just the crime wave, it’s their perception that the local police don’t care enough, or aren’t brave enough, to act on the information the community gives them to rout out the gangs or arrest the drug dealers – or both.
In desperation, they have taken the law into their own hands. It’s understandable, but inexcusable. It’s also something that is extremely difficult to eradicate once it takes root.
Our nation was blighted by mob justice in the 1980s and early 1990s; the kangaroo courts and their necklaces invoked a reign of terror and horror, rendering townships ungovernable and lawless.
The rationale then was the overthrow of an illegal regime. The rationale now is the stemming of a crime wave. Both are laudable objectives, but the end can never justify the means. Two wrongs can never make a right.
The police have to act. They have a sworn duty to take the information they receive seriously and arrest the addicts and their pushers. But they’ve also got to throw the book at residents who take the law into their own hands. That is the law. That is the constitution. There is no middle ground.