Ignoring rule of law puts society in gridlock
EVERY morning, squeezed into the scramble to get my daughters to school before the bell, I suffer a minor karmic disruption. More often than not I have forgotten it by the time I shoo them over the zebra crossing on their way to the gate.
But at other times it gnaws at my tranquillity.
It is the everyday selfishness of some, played out in their lack of road manners – an irritation so banal that it should barely ripple the surface, yet it grates so sometimes that the girls fall silent in the back seat while I smoulder behind the wheel.
It’s a fairly universal experience: there is a traffic circle on our route where cars must queue before they can exit on the left. Invariably, some motorists sail by in the right lane, which is empty, then dart into the queue just before the exit, sometimes leaving the car they cut off with the choice either to cause an accident or brake to let them in.
Of course, this is not some trial visited specially on me.
So I have wondered what it is that incenses me so, given that the difference in travelling time between the “cheaters” and the rest of us can be no more than a few minutes.
Months of worrying – while roadworks slowed things further – have led me to a working conclusion: it is not others getting ahead unfairly that is especially infuriating (though it’s annoying enough), but their contempt for those of us who choose to follow the rules.
They must imagine, I think, that we are too stupid to notice the advantages of jumping the queue, that their greater powers of analysis entitle them to the benefit of being first.
In fact, so I have come to tell myself, it is they who are too self-absorbed to realise that if we all followed their example, chaos would ensue, there would be multiple collisions each day and we would all take far longer to reach our destinations.
Our compliance is a choice in the interests of all of us.
This is a fundamental organising principle of society and the reason there are laws we generally choose to obey.
Without them the threat of one person’s interests snuffing out those of another, based solely on their power or appetite for risk, rises to the point where none can prosper, or even live very long.
Most importantly, it is the consent of the majority to abide by the rules that gives them life to regulate competing needs and create order.
Without this consent the rules would cease to have meaning or value.
But I have also noticed, travelling in a minibus taxi, for example, that it can be quite thrilling to witness the mute rage of the suburban elite trailing in the wake of a driver who carves up traffic with skilful abandon.
It has struck me that if you have had to rise hours before these comfortable souls in their family sedans just so you can be on time, among many inequities you battle daily, it may not strike you as unfair at all should your driver happen to get you there first, for once.
Perhaps fairness, or justice, are relative concepts and not simply a question of what the rules say.
Events of this week raise this question at a more complex level than the morning traffic.
One is the arrival and state-sanctioned departure of Sudanese President and genocide suspect Omar al-Bashir, in defiance of an international warrant for his arrest and this country’s own law, another is the announcement by the DA that it had filed its heads of argument in its application for a judicial review of the decision to drop corruption charges against President Jacob Zuma, and the third is the failure of Parliament, once again, to get through a Q&A session with the president without things falling apart.
These issues have tested conceptions of the rule of law and provoked divergent reactions, over many years in the case of the Zuma corruption charges.
On the face of it, regardless of whether or not the International Criminal Court is the impartial organ of justice it should be, the fact that South Africa had acceded to the Rome Statute and that Parliament had ratified it should have obliged our authorities to effect al-Bashir’s arrest, based solely on the principle of the rule of law.
Similarly, regardless of whether or not there was a political conspiracy to prevent Zuma from becoming president, and elements within the National Prosecuting Authority allowed themselves to become actors in this conspiracy – as he claims – the case against him should be tested in court, again because this is what the rule of law requires.
And, unless he contests the findings of the public protector in her Nkandla report in court and wins, Zuma should “pay back the money”.
Yet quite rational people disagree on these questions or, at least, are not nearly as vexed by them as others.
Whatever the law says, it’s clear that as long as a government is prepared to view compliance as optional, and as long as there is no shared point of departure in society, the rule of law will remain an abstract con- cept, applied selectively and with impunity as a consequence.
The events in Parliament on Thursday show where this will take us if things don’t change: the queue-jumping contempt of a president for the law-abiding rest of us gives some the belief they have a licence to jump it also and the result is a system in gridlock.
Important as the DA’s pursuit of due process in Zuma’s corruption case may be, or for that matter the inquiry ordered by the court into the departure of al-Bashir, even if they are successful, these steps, on their own, will not return us, if we were ever there, to a uniform application of the rule of law.
As long as a majority finds significant aspects of our system alien to their interests, because they appear to serve only to lock them out, there will always be opportunity for its rules to be ignored, with a semblance of justification in some cases.
Up to now this has allowed Zuma, for one, to stave off the charges against him, with handsome contributions from the taxpayer to his defence.
It may be the Nkandla scandal, because it speaks to the discontent of so many, has created a convergence of opinion that will test this impunity.
The anti-corruption march sponsored by trade unions and civil society organisations planned for August will be an interesting gauge of this and, possibly, a point from which to start rebuilding belief in the necessity of the rule of law.
But only when the whole of society feels it has a stake in the system is it likely to take hold. If that can be achieved the rule of law will quite possibly take care of itself.