Murder just part of SA landscape
Matters
For more than 16 years, writer and editor Jeremy Gordin lived a block up from me in the suburb of Parkview, Johannesburg.
Almost every day I would see him trudging down to Zoo Lake with his dog, shambling along with his silver beard, looking a bit like a shaggy Labrador himself.
He would often say hello, but sometimes he was too grumpy to say a word.
Gordin did not like me much.
In the late 2000s he became close to the ascendant Jacob Zuma crowd in the ANC, and even wrote a gushing Zuma biography.
Gordin thought my columns were too hard on his subject.
I didn’t mind Gordin’s criticisms. I knew I was hard on Zuma.
Like most South Africans, I have high standards.
Zuma represented the lowering of those standards in our public life.
Gordin was a brilliant satirist.
He could use humour to skewer and expose political (and journalistic) hypocrisy.
For decades he used this gift to rail against all manner of things, and was hugely respected for his work.
He could also be caustic, arrogant and plain wrong on many subjects.
Thankfully, he kept on writing anyway.
Yesterday, I learnt that he was dead, murdered in his own home by robbers on Friday.
For a week, many of us in journalism will write nice things about him, send off tweets, and within 14 days we will have moved on.
Our anger and outrage will have been done, and we will not connect his murder to those of others before him.
You see, this was not the first time there was an invasion of Gordin’s home.
He had been burgled several times before.
Were the perpetrators ever found?
In 2006, a man entered my home on that same street and shot at me and my wife.
The private security firm arrived and searched for the invaders.
The police only arrived an hour later.
There were no arrests. Gordin’s murder registers on my radar because he was a colleague and a neighbour.
The truth is that murder is now commonplace in most of SA.
We have stopped talking about it because our government has failed totally to do anything about it.
People are killed in huge numbers every day.
We don’t even blink unless the victim is someone we know.
This is the tragedy of Gordin’s death.
In our country, life means nothing.
The outrageous has become normal.
I have said this before and I will say it again, if the police cannot apprehend the killers of Senzo Meyiwa, murdered in front of at least seven witnesses, then what chance is there for an unknown victim in Soshanguve or Lehurutshe?
What chance for a child in Richmond, KwaZulu-Natal?
It is, sadly, not just in the realm of crime that we have normalised the outrageous.
Across the board, we fold our arms and watch as things get worse.
Over the past two weeks, I spent time in the Western Cape.
I do not mean to fetishise the province, but I drove for two weeks without hitting a pothole.
It was only when I visited the home affairs office in Stellenbosch that I was confronted by two massive potholes at its gate.
The rest of the country has normalised not maintaining roads.
So it goes.
A few days ago, the KwaZulu-Natal province was in high excitement because the auditor-general was flying in for a meeting with local government leaders.
Now, our AGs have for two decades been begging politicians to stop the rot at local level.
Yet, the qualified audits continue and the corrupt municipal managers and mayors are retained.
It is abnormal now to be honest in local government. Corruption is the norm. Twelve years ago, a young reporter on The Times was writing about ANC corruption at water boards.
No-one even batted an eyelid about his stories.
That reporter moved on, but the problems he highlighted have not gone away.
Mark my words, the next big scandal in SA will be when we do not have water coming out of the taps because key water infrastructure has been compromised by corruption.
We have lowered our standards.
Cops don’t catch murderers and we are fine with it.
They stamp affidavits and certify ID copies.
Cabinet ministers don’t deliver on their promises.
They swan about in expensive cars and large retinues.
Eskom doesn’t deliver electricity.
Every month and every year it gets worse, and we say nothing and we do nothing.
Parkview, Johannesburg, is an upper middle-class suburb.
It has a police station that is pretty decent.
Private security personnel are highly visible in its streets.
Yet the person who shot at me in my bed 17 years ago is still walking free.
What chance that the people who murder someone in Diepsloot will be arrested?
What chance that the people who murdered Gordin in his home last week will be arrested?
The outrageous has become normal, and that is no good for our future.
JUSTICE MALALA
In our country, life means nothing. The outrageous has become normal