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SA cuts off its nose in spite

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Mondli Makhanya
Mondli Makhanya

The police report was very matter of fact: “Five classrooms were burnt at one school. At another school, four classrooms were burnt, and another and one classroom was destroyed at another school.”

North West police spokesperson Paul Ramaloko further revealed a clinic had been burnt down.

The report was referring to protests that took place at a place called Atamelang. Atamewhere? Atamelang near Delareyville. Delawhere? Delareyville is a little town with a population of fewer than 15 000, located somewhere in the vicinity of Vryburg, Wolmaransstad and Schweizer-Reneke. You know, the kind of place where going on a date often means sharing a meal with your sister in the family dining room. And, and, and...

Anyway, the residents of Atamelang took to the streets this week to push home their demands for electricity. Their resort to destruction followed years of appealing to various levels and arms of government, to no avail.

In June, pupils at a school in another never-been-heard-of township called Mpozolo in the Eastern Cape torched a school because they felt their demands for renovations were being ignored by the education department.

“The fire destroyed all the books and equipment and other documents,” the cops said, again in a very routine way.

In July, residents in a place called Bona Bona village near Vryburg set fire to buildings at the local primary school using gas cylinders from the kitchen, in the process destroying 15 computers. Their gripe was about the lack of tarred roads, water and electricity.

In March, the people of the Winnie Mandela informal settlement in Tembisa in Gauteng burnt down a clinic while protesting against the Ekurhuleni municipality cutting off illegal electricity connections. Angry Ekurhuleni mayor Mondli Gungubele reacted with some befuddlement to the community’s actions.

“It is quite sad when you see these incidents. How do you set a clinic on fire when you and your family are dependent on it for survival? This just does not make sense,” said Gungubele while visiting the scene of the protests.

It was an apt response to a phenomenon that sadly has become endemic in South Africa. With nearly 15 000 protests taking place in the past year – of which 2 300 turned violent – we no longer flinch when hearing about such incidents.

For reasons those in the upper classes and in power do not fully grasp, communities demand better services by destroying existing public services. This phenomenon speaks to a deeper problem in South Africa – the absence of a sense of ownership of public resources. This in itself is reflective of citizens’ relationship with the state.

In the bad old days – in the South Africa the misty-eyed Dianne Kohler Barnard is nostalgic about – destroying public property was pretty cool. Public property belonged to the apartheid state, its surrogate Bantustan governments or puppet local councils. So if you set fire to a government building or stoned a car with the letter “G” on the licence plate, you were punching PW Botha. Where I come from, if you burnt a car with the licence plate “ZG” it felt like kicking the cantankerous chief in the gut. And oh, boy! That really felt good.

But deep into the life of the democratic state, the people have not changed their attitude towards state property. To them, the local library, school, clinic and council belong to somebody else – a power external to their existence. They feel that if they destroy public property they are hurting that external power. This has huge implications for the entrenchment of state legitimacy.

This matter will no doubt feature at the ANC’s national general council (NGC) this week but is unlikely to receive the kind of serious attention it deserves. Judging by the cursory reference it receives in one of the party’s NGC discussion documents, the ANC is in denial about the impact of these actions on citizens’ relationship with the state. The document recognises the escalation in violent protests that have “resulted in the loss of life and destruction of property” and it passingly refers to a number of interventions the party and government have made to deal with the problem.

But it contains some unnecessary denialism, something that seeks to minimise the scale of the problem.

“These protests are not unique to South Africa, as they are witnessed in some other parts of the world as well. Protest could also be informed by the global economic crisis, leading to high levels of unemployment, escalating poverty, etc,” the document says.

True. But it is not irrelevant if the people of Athens, Madrid, Ferguson and London also protest. Here we are in the process of entrenching the legitimacy of the democratic state, so drawing parallels with established societies does not help. Who cares if the other guy also has a large pimple on his nose?

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