SA IS CLOSELY FOLLOWING THE PLAYBOOK OF POST-COLONIAL AFRICAN DISASTER STORIES
Responses to Criminal (In)justice
“A threat assessment would be carried out and given to the judicial officer presiding over the matter.
“Work and residential assessment reports would be forwarded to the SAPS’s Crime Intelligence unit, as well as to the Justice and Constitutional Development Department’s Security and Risk Unit.
“A security plan, involving consultation with figures in the justice and security areas, would be created and approved.
“Based on the plan, Crime Intelligence and the department’s Security and Risk Unit would approve protection services to the presiding magistrate and their family for a set period. More threat assessments would be conducted as a case progressed.”
Can you imagine how long all these risk and threat assessments would take to assess and process?! By the time any conclusion is reached, if any is reached at all, the people who are at risk would probably already either have been assaulted or have been taken out by the perpetrators.
Yet if it’s about passing a resolution to give out more taxpayers’ money to prop up failing state-owned enterprises, or pay salary increases to civil servants and other lazy, unproductive members of our bureaucracy, that can be done with minimal effort by the bunch of rogues who make up the ANC. Rod Braude
It’s remarkable how closely SA is following the playbook of post-colonial African disaster stories. These include corruption, lambasting of the foreign Constitution foisted upon the locals, upending the system of law and order, and then violence aimed at actual or perceived “obstacles to the revolution”.
Among these obstacles are numbered the judges because they serve as useful and largely defenceless punchbags.
Of course, the reason why the judiciary has been placed in this unenviable position is in large measure due to the Constitution itself. It was drafted by people who had little understanding of the function that a Constitution can or should perform.
It shifted the focus of social, ideological developmental and service provision issues from the political sphere to the judicial.
This was a dangerous mistake that may ultimately prove fatal.
Are people surprised that judges are under attack? They shouldn’t be. Errol Price