A little bit of enthusiasm goes a long way

THE death of George Floyd at the hands of the police has sharpened the focus on inescapable realities, that American society places a perilously low value on black lives.

It is deplorable that almost 70 years since racial segregation was abolished in America, people of colour are still routinely slaughtered for the colour of their skin. We will not be cowed, to remain silent in the face of the lynching of black people wherever they manifest.

There’s is surely nothing to contradict in the above sentiments, but the context makes the words laughably hypocritical. I have extracted them verbatim, albeit without any giveaway quotation marks, from a statement from the ANC.

Yup, the very same ANC that is yet to express remorse for the deaths of 11 black South Africans during police and military actions to enforce the Covid-19 lockdown.

Yup, the very same ANC that has yet to manage a single criminal conviction stemming from the police shootings of 34 black South African mineworkers at Marikana in 2012.

Yup, the very same ANC that has yet to deliver justice to the families of 144 mostly black South Africans who died in the 2015 Life Esidimeni outrage because of the actions of government officials.

It’s pointless blaming the ANC. While it is true that the governing party has reached levels of moral contemptibility that few would have conceived possible 26 years ago, politicians are only human. Their actions are largely determined by what they think they can get away with.

One of the befuddling aspects of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s lacklustre presidency is how gently the media treats him. This week the president conducted a virtual press conference with the leaders of the SA National Editor’s Forum. This was the first chance that the media had to pose direct questions to him in more than two months of a national crisis. But presidential charm carried the day.

Nobody asked about 11 dead black men allegedly killed during lockdown by cops and soldiers. Nobody asked about a lockdown so harsh that it has elicited the UN’s criticism.

Nobody asked why an ANC government opposed a court application by the family of Collins Khosa, killed for the heinous crime of having a drink in his backyard, that the police and military be ordered to abide by the Constitution.

Nobody asked about 230 000 arrests for ludicrous infringements of petty regulations. Nobody asked about the dozens of police officers arrested for trading in confiscated bootleg alcohol and illegal cigarettes. Most obviously of all, nobody asked the president why he never once during his televised addresses to the nation, directly addressed these matters.

The closest it got to nitty-gritty was a question on contradictory government communications around the cigarette ban. The police demanding a till slip from anyone caught with cigarettes, conceded Ramaphosa, was a “graphic example” of “overenthusiasm”.

He had “very clearly” stressed, including to the police and soldiers, that “we should not go out there as if we are confronting an enemy … Of course, because we are dealing with so many people, there are those whose enthusiasm gets ahead of them.”

This elliptical allusion to state brutality will be scant consolation to the families of those killed. But at least they now know that their brothers, fathers, husbands and sons died not because of poor training, ill-discipline or brutishness.

It was something more benign. It was something captivatingly childlike – an “over-enthusiasm” that caused basically well-meaning servants of the state to “get ahead of themselves”.

The president also went unchallenged when reiterating the claim by Co-operative Governance Minister Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma that the backtracking on lifting the tobacco ban was in response to “at least 2 000” appeals. There were only 1535 public submissions, of which almost half had nothing to do with smoking and almost a quarter opposed the ban. Less than 30% of the submissions supported the ban – just 454. This anomaly is not because Dlamini Zuma exaggerates shamelessly or fibs relentlessly. It’s just her natural over-enthusiasm. So cute in a septuagenarian.