In just two months we have veered towards tyranny
One year ago, we voted in a free and fair election in a progressive and open country. For all of their faults, the executive and legislative branches were committed to not just preserving liberty but enhancing it. And politicians were governing as democrats. Times have changed.
Not only did it mark liberation from a totalitarian regime, the 1994 election was both an irrevocable mandate for a democratic state and a watershed in humanity’s quest for liberty. The first written record of the word “freedom”, in ancient Sumerian cuneiform, dates to 2300 BCE when people in what is now Iraq were revolting against a tyrannical regime.
The constant push for liberty has marked the flow of history and has often been paid for in blood, as in SA. Our constitution is a particularly remarkable addition to this history.
What the constitution drives for is an individual’s freedom to determine his or her own life, without interference from the state — philosophers call this “negative liberty”. Neither the state nor society can impose any other life on you. If you want to spend your life studying beetles, you can. If you want to drink yourself into an early grave, you can do that too. Your choice alone.
The political rights in the constitution are barriers against the state or anyone else interfering with your life — for example, the freedoms of worship, association, speech and movement. In addition, the drafters of the constitution understood that liberty cannot be realised if an individual does not have a degree of economic freedom. You cannot decide to be a surgeon if you are too poor to afford university. Poverty, ill health and inadequate education prevent an individual from choosing the life she wants.
The constitution hardwires a variety of socio-economic rights. People have the right to housing, medical care, education, water and a clean environment, all of which allow negative liberty to flourish.
And that’s the 1994 mandate — negative liberty with the maximisation of socio-economic rights. Because this mandate legitimated SA’s democratic state, it is an irrevocable social contract that gloriously binds us to democracy. If the state becomes a theocracy, dictatorship, military junta or any other tyrannical regime, it loses its legitimacy and citizens have no obligation to obey it.
The justification for the lockdown’s temporary curtailment of some liberties was to buy time for the health system to prepare for the inevitable infections and deaths. Since this has been achieved, political freedoms must be restored without delay. The lockdown in its current form has to stop. The government’s response to the Covid-19 threat is now disproportionate, bureaucratic, arbitrary and brutal.
From 3-million to 7-million people will lose their jobs. The Treasury’s ability to fund social welfare is decreasing by the day. The coming economic depression, the worst of which could have been avoided, will impoverish the black middle class as a whole — the effective reversal of BEE. In other words, the bungled economic response to Covid-19 is negating our socio-economic rights and is diminishing negative liberty in the long term.
According to epidemiologists, actuarial scientists, medical ethicists and economists, we should now be at level 2. So why aren’t we? The charitable explanation is that the government can’t see beyond Covid-19 — the lockdown has become an end in and of itself. Time then for the cabinet to listen to the experts and restore freedom. An irrational government is unfit to rule. There’s a more worrying explanation: our politicians are not democrats. A military curfew is not the act of democrats, neither is the classification of cabinet minutes, nor is the withholding of epidemiological data.
Arbitrary diktats abound. Trade & industry minister Ebrahim Patel channels the Soviet Union’s state planning committee. Labour minister Thulas Nxesi desires to impose xenophobic employment quotas on restaurants and spaza shops. Defence minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula threatens that, “For now, we’re a constitutional democracy.”
On May 11, the Independent Electoral Commission hinted that next year’s municipal elections will be delayed.
The ANC has gotten a taste of real state power and likes it. A lot. With the police and army willing to kick the constitution to pieces, the ANC has discovered it can shed the cumbersome processes of democracy and assume autocratic control. Power is far more addictive than cigarettes.
If the ANC continues down this path, it will set up a conflict with society, one that society will eventually win no matter the cost. Either by the sheer scale of opposition or at the ballot box, the ANC will fall. Societies wrench liberty back from rulers who steal it.