Consciences have vanished
ONE Sunday evening in the winter of 2009, SABC1’s now discontinued Asikhulume current affairs TV show invited Police Minister Nathi Mthethwa to discuss the remilitarisation of police ranks.
The cocky minister found it rather easy to make his case with viewers clearly sick of violent crime.
He insisted that restoring military ranks would strike fear in the hearts of criminals.
The host pressed the minister to explain exactly how this fear would arise if the legal framework governing police conduct remained the same.
Mthethwa waffled an answer, the same as he did when fellow guest Prince Mashele, a political analyst, proposed that this would lead to police brutality and compromise the credibility painstakingly built since 1994.
Nonetheless, popular sentiment supported Mthethwa.
Some police officers who called in were hopeful that their salaries would be reviewed in line with their new, grandiose ranks.
Even President Jacob Zuma had weighed in on the matter, mocking the previous police ranking system as laughable. He also threw his weight behind a more aggressive approach to policing.
By the end of Mthethwa’s first year on the job, 294 people had died in police custody.
Less than two years after the TV show, Mthethwa’s police killed a Ficksburg political activist, Andries Tatane, in cold blood. Justice was promised but never delivered as the constabulary closed ranks and ensured the court didn’t have the testimony it needed to bring the murderers to book.
His killers walk the streets with guns, ready to shoot again.
Some readers may take issue with labelling Tatane a “political activist” rather than the less descriptive “service delivery protester”. Service delivery protests are political statements aimed at political institutions and mandarins.
People do not protest because they are bored.
They take to the streets when they feel that the political system and its institutions do not respond to their plight.
It is to such political statements that government sends the police in response. But I digress. Since then, the Zuma-Mthethwa doctrine of aggressive policing has given us a litany of horrors ranging from Marikana and Sasolburg to the dragging and beating to death of Mozambican Mido Macia. Mothutlung, near Brits, is the latest outrage.
The departure of the bellicose Bheki Cele as national police commissioner hasn’t dampened the mood as his replacement, Riah Phiyega, congratulated the police for a “job well done” after they massa- cred mine Marikana.
On the day a protester fell from a moving police vehicle and died in Mothutlung I took a walk through the Rosebank, Johannesburg shopping area.
Many South Africans were conducting their business over sumptuous food and drinks, seemingly oblivious to the blood and gore being spilt not too far away.
I couldn’t help thinking this must be what white people must have done during the heyday of apartheid and its violent
workers
at police force. The trouble seemed like a whole country away and with the help of a good life delivered by the same government that was killing poor blacks protesting for basic rights, it wasn’t so hard to put things in “perspective”.
In the same week, the ANC’s national working committee, of which Mthethwa is a member, issued a statement condemning police action.
The farce would be funny if it weren’t so tragic.
If anything, it demonstrated that no-one is about to take political responsibility for police violence, not the ANC and not its police minister.
One day our children will ask why we never did anything in the face of such violations of human rights. We, particularly black people whose historical experience should make us more repulsed than anyone else but who are too preoccupied with the spoils of freedom to care, will have to tell them: “We had become the new whites”.