Unrelenting vigilance needed to monitor govt

ALL of a sudden, South Africa is again a politically interesting country to live in.

In 1994 there was a lot of excitement that the almost 100 years of struggle for a place under the sun by black people was coming to fruition.

A democratically-elected government was installed and we were assured that the face of South Africa would never be the same again – South Africa would, thenceforth, have what Steve Biko called a more humane face!

Millions of South Africans gobbled this up hurriedly without making the slightest effort to digest it.

Organisations of civil society were quickly demobilised, for we had, at last, arrived in the land of milk and honey.

There was no longer any need to watch over the instruments of state power. In the words of Ayi Kwei Armah, the sons of the nation were, after all, now in charge!

There were some, to be sure, who cautioned against such credulity and called for a more prudent approach to politics. Against the background of the euphoria following the liquidation of apartheid, we very quickly labelled these people, just as we did during the struggle for liberation, fringe groups and political malcontents.

Little or nothing remained to be heard of their voices as we busied ourselves with whatever it took to extract milk and honey from the new dispensation.

Every once in a while, something would happen which, if we were attentive, might shake us out of our deep slumber. There were pockets of protest in different parts of the country which cried out for our attention, but they were quickly expunged from our consciousness as just one more example of acts by people who were hell-bent on disrupting our enjoyment of the fruit of our liberation.

We could, if we had chosen, have woken up when Andries Tatane was killed in cold blood by the police. We could, if we had chosen, have woken up at every report of someone dying at the hands of the police, whether the killing happened in police cells or in the killing fields of Cato Manor.

But no, the sons and daughters of the nation were in charge and we could trust them to do the right thing.

So nothing, nearly nothing, could disturb our precious sleep in the knowledge that everything we have struggled for is, ultimately, well guarded by the sons and daughters of the nation.

South Africa had become, after 1994, in many ways so unexciting that Neville Alexander saw us as just another ordinary country. All the uplifting debates about the government’s responsibilities and the need for civil society to hold government accountable had died down.

When agents of the government messed up, we trusted the government itself to set that right. Prof Johan van der Vyver would have commented that the jackal is given the responsibility to watch over the jackal!

While committed to our slumber, we would have responded: these guys are not jackals – they are the sons and daughters of the nation, we can trust them to do the right thing!

It took a small mining village outside Rustenburg called Marikana, which an overwhelming majority of South Africans probably did not even know existed, to wake us up.

The people who were killed there are dead, nothing will bring them back to life. But it is heartening that in the shadow of their death, we seem once again to take our responsibili- ties seriously. The public outcry throughout the country about the shootings and the crazy charges brought against striking workers, the threatened march on the court that would be hearing those charges in Ga-Rankuwa and the seminar at the Human Sciences Research Council in Pretoria on Friday next week – one hopes all these mark the start of a new chapter where we are prepared no longer to abdicate our political responsibilities for the future of our country.

Marikana is a reminder of how fragile political arrangements can be.

It is a reminder of the tenuousness of theories which tie the destiny of countries to big men.

At particular historical moments we may need big, strong men to rally around. But big men come and go.

Unrelenting vigilance is what we need to see us through the vicissitudes of life. It will not stop a massacre, but those who would massacre us will know that there will be hell to pay for it.