Charity Begins at Home

One of the criticism that was directed against president T. Mbeki was that he concentrated power in the office of the presidency and orientated everything to his personality. We were told there was urgent need to strengthen local-government if our democracy had any hope of success. The ANC (African National Congress) conference in December 2007 at Polokwane took the initiative by voting T.Mbeki out as ANC president through the concerted efforts of party branch structures. Most of us were hopeful coming from that conference that things were turning for the best. Perhaps we should have been more circumspect where we saw the manner of the so called democratic process in Polokwane, which was more manipulations by organised factions within branch level of the ANC than anything else. Collectivism is not always democracy.

After Polokwane the ANC Members of Parliament seemed to breathe fresh air, voicing their views vigorously, pushing the margins of their party towards a more consultative and democratic process to guard against the erosion of our constitutional values. After the hearing process for the dissolution of the Scorpios it seems as though Parliament has gone back to its past habits of being a karaoke club for Luthili House (ANC headquarters). What the South African Parliament lacks, it seems glaringly clear now, is what Kerry Kennedy called, in a recent lecture at University of Cape Town recently, ‘moral courage’ to dissent towards the maintenance of constitutional law even against party caucus when necessary.

Caucusing in Parliament is nothing unique to the ANC, even if those in the minority do it, and tend to cry foul whenever they loose. If anything, the past few years of our democracy should have convinced us by now that “party-parliamentarism” does not really give power to mobile vulgus, but to vested interest of party leadership. This, indeed, is a false substitute for people's representatives. For check and balances we should, at the least, consider changing the system to include individual candidates for local-governance and Members of Parliament. Isn’t a ground vote the whole point behind popular representation? Our democratic system has to be organic, live up to our local challenges as they arise. This might also give us reprise from the nascent nauseating group politics within and out of the ruling party.


I do understand, nor respect, the formation of groups on economical, cooperative, territorial, educational, professional, industrial principles, or even political values for that matter. I respect formation based on moral values, which is why Kerry Kennedy’s lecture touched me so much. After Polokwane, there was lot of talk about strengthening Local Government, which was taken as the nadir of good governance. Of course there are no guarantees that a strong Local Government means good governance, if the Republic of China is anything to go by. In China the central government is almost hapless against local government that is often very corrupt and unruly in following the passed laws of the republic, especially Environmental laws that are flaunted at will by local governments when bribed by businessman. On the same breath, good local governance is possible, as exemplified in countries like Switzerland and other federal working states.

Of course, the cause for moral courage is a double edged sword. For instance, it cannot be that it is needed only in Africa, despite Ms Kennedy’s emphasis, even if Africa is the continent most fraught with problems associated with limited civil justice. As long as, for instance, trading tendencies tend to be bias against the developing world, moral courage will be needed also by those in Western countries to “Speak Truth To Power.” When people are imprisoned on secluded islands indefinitely just for suspicion of being terrorists, moral courage is also needed to speak out. There’s also a clear danger, beyond the obvious, in narrowing the borders of moral courage to include only instance one agrees with. In thinking civil justice is only concomitant with only liberal democracy, for instance.

Another cause, blatant in our country, is how the majority of our people live with hunger and permanent refugee status in different informal places around the country. But you hardly here any moral courage coming out of private people and business against it. When the first fires blazed, in the form of xenophobic attacks, there was more moralising and condemnation than moral courage. The only moral courage we saw was in the form of philanthropic help for the displaced people, which was a good thing. But the whole thing reminded me of something René Girard once said; that “The victims most interesting to us are always those who allow us to condemn our neighbors. And our neighbors do the same.” The thing about moral courage is that it requires the ever widening of borders of empathy and dissent without neglecting what’s under your nose. As the idiom goes, charity begins at home.

My Take

All my life I grew up under the shadow of violence. The first girl I ever kissed was, twelve years old, burnt to death by the so called ‘comrades’ through cruel means then called necklace—a tyre filled with petrol and newspapers. Her sin? Being born into a family whose head, her father, decided to run for mayourship, in disregard of the call to make ‘South Africa ungovernable.’

A friend I grew up with turned up dead at a sewer after eight days, bitten into a state of pulped tomato. He was last seen being picked by the South African police Special Branch. His mother could not even recognize him, and lost her will to live afterwards, looking at us with accusing eyes, as if it was our fault we didn’t instead of her son. She died seven years later of a heart related problem. Until 1997 when houses in the area were demolished for RDP houses, her house remained empty and unclaimed. No one wanted to be associated with the house termed ‘death house’.

There was in our township something close to a celebration of death; a weekend without one was strange, even unbelievable. Modes of dying included being robbed, or even dying at the hands of those you loved, what today is termed domestic violence. There was a general anarchical break of law and moral accountability. The Afrikaner poetess and author of the grim book titled Country of my Skull, Antjie Krog, gave our township, Mlungisi in Queenstown, an invidious honour of being the first place where the necklace was used. My memory of what happened in our streets then concurs with this conclusion.

Of course we blamed the apartheid government, more for institutionalized and state violence. The more we struggled against violence the more we seemed vulnerable from the criminal element, state propagated and otherwise. We tried our best to let the immediate and outside world to hear our cry, but none cared enough to come to our rescue. Then a strange thing happened. The country gained its political independence in 1994. State violence subsided while social crime gained confidence to attack suburbs and business area. We started seeing stories of criminal element in public spaces like media, a novel and belated praecipe indeed.

This did not mean criminals gave the township a break; they still harassed us like before and more. But we all agreed then that criminals were enemies of us all, and the development of the country at large. We started seeing more police visibility in our townships that was not only concerned with political activists. It was not enough of course, but it demonstrated a political will to tackle the scourge. It made us feel our lives mattered too, and make us feel we were not treated like schlock. But the scourge continued to rise unabated. Up to this day township denizens are the worse affected by crime, but less vocal, call it fatalism or adjustment to occupational hazard, or whatever you like.

Then another strange thing happened. Nelson Mandela put down the reigns as the president, handing them to Thabo Mbeki. Within no time the criminal element was no longer just an enemy of us all, but a fault of government. Arguments were made that the government was not treating the matter as an emergency. People, white folks mostly, started asking if the solution was not in declaring national state of emergency. Naturally, those of who grew up on the conditions of abuse that comes with state emergency are opposed to this solution.

By Thabo Mbeki’s second tenure crime was no longer just a government’s fault but that of the president. The president was termed a denialist. Again we tried to follow the argument. In the end the real crime of the president was what was called a defiant non-sympathetic mood against the citizenry that was suffering consequences of crime—the hidden one being the fact that he has become the boogey man of imperialist hegemony, and scapegoat of everything that goes wrong in the country.

In no time it became clear the country didn’t have the best police force in the world; but there is evidence also that most policemen are of average courage and integrity, under appreciated and poorly paid. But the evidence of corruption against some of them prevails and feeds the pessimistic mood against the police force in general. This prompted the president to call us, with some justification, “. . . spokespersons of doom or cheerleaders of bad news.”

The truth of the matter is that the scourge of crime affects us all. It has been a rude wakening for those who spent their lives in this country in comfortable cocoons into the realization that this country was founded, and still subsists, on abnormality. It also gives those made impotent by their prejudices and political dispossession, together with the rest of opportunist doomsayer footlickers, to spew invective in attempt to catch the coattails of liberal specious enlightenment, a handle to beat the government by. Crime has been used, especially by white South Africans, as means to discredit the present South African, and cry wolf for a failing state in the offing.