President Cyril Ramaphosa needs to be given some advice that is crucial to maintaining the very foundations of our constitutional order. He must, at some point, accept that the events of Marikana in 2012 constitute an important political blind spot with which he needs help.
It is understandable that he is sensitive and wants to make sure that his term as president is not characterised by massacres. Ramaphosa has been accused, mainly by the EFF, of being to blame for the police killing of the 34 miners at Marikana because, in his then capacity as a nonexecutive director of mine-owner Lonmin, he sent e-mails at the time urging “concomitant action” by police against the striking miners, who he described as “dastardly criminals”.
When Ramaphosa assumed office six years later, the EFF used the controversy to project Ramaphosa as someone with blood on his hands.
In consequence, Ramaphosa has been at pains to ensure that his security chiefs don’t perpetuate this image of him as a bloodthirsty killer by using force against civilians.
Empiricists such as John Locke believe experience to be the primary source of knowledge, as opposed to those who believe that rational reflection is sufficient.
George Berkeley, an Irish philosopher born in 1685, wrote that “to be is to be perceived”. He posited that nothing can be real unless it perceives or is perceived.
And Ramaphosa is understandably irked by the perception that he is a bloodthirsty leader. So he bends over backwards to ensure that no blood is spilt. The effect on policing is crippling inaction. This is why when throngs of people descended on Nkandla a few weeks ago in complete disregard of Ramaphosa’s lockdown injunction that there should be no gatherings because of a raging pandemic, the police could do nothing.
The supporters intentionally defied Ramaphosa. The police, on the other hand, were instructed to be creative.
The result was police inaction. Not even tear gas was fired. Nothing. The gathering made nonsense of the president’s level 4 lockdown orders. Everyone there defied the president because they knew his blind spot — he doesn’t want another Marikana on his watch. So people fight him but he must play nice because he doesn’t want to prove his detractors right.
When Jacob Zuma eventually handed himself in, the police behaved as though this was their victory, overlooking the fact that large gatherings are outlawed for a reason. The coronavirus is taking many lives. One victim, acknowledged in Ramaphosa’s Friday evening address, is Zuma’s brother Mike. The point is, even the Zuma family ought now to know how lethal this virus is and realise that defiance of the ban on gatherings will directly harm those in attendance — but not necessarily Ramaphosa.
In other words, while the police may not have used bullets to kill people at Nkandla two weeks ago, they put many more lives, including Zuma’s, at risk by failing to prevent the illegal gathering.
For Ramaphosa, what matters is being perceived as someone who is opposed to the use of deadly force — even though he is allowing the virus to kill people. Apart from the health risk, the Nkandla gathering made our president look weak; a handful of instigators using primordial, tribalistic forms of organisation created a perception of vulnerability.
For Ramaphosa, what matters is being perceived as someone who is opposed to the use of deadly force — even though he is allowing the virus to kill people
And if indeed Berkeley is right that to be is to be perceived, those who gathered at Nkandla in support of Zuma will believe the throne is ready for the taking. And, in any case, Ramaphosa, in his response, will be hamstrung by his desire to avoid bloodshed.
His opponents, meanwhile, will go for the kill, crippling crucial supply chains, shutting down our national roads, making ours look like a Mickey Mouse democracy. Those who have always had their doubts about SA’s exceptionalism had their “aha” moment during the violent anarchy: “There they go, these barbarians, looting and being oblivious of the harm all this will cause to themselves — in the short term, they will run out of food and crucial supplies, and in the long run they will also lose jobs.”
But we all have a duty to counsel Ramaphosa that where the authority of the state is threatened, it is OK to use force to contain something that could send us hurtling into the abyss. To not do so constitutes dereliction of duty by the head of state.
South Africans who stood in long, Zimbabwe-style queues for fuel in KwaZulu-Natal didn’t deserve it. Johannesburg residents who went into panic-buying mode did so because it became increasingly clear that, as WB Yeats would put it, the centre, albeit temporarily, could not hold and anarchy was loosed upon the world. They deserved better from Ramaphosa.
The damage to investor confidence means some will look elsewhere and jobs that could have been secured here will no longer come.
Unemployed South Africans, holding on to hope, deserve a president who can put his foot down, a president who is not hamstrung by fears of being seen as brutal, a president who is ready and willing to do what is necessary to protect and pursue the national interest rather than worry about how he is perceived.
This week, Ramaphosa spectacularly dropped the ball, endangering the interests of us all, including our democracy itself. That he and his administration have never thought of how to deal with the straightforward threat of a criminal horde attacking key buildings must alarm us all.
The president must be persuaded to leave the ghost of Marikana behind and focus on the job at hand. Someone must remind him that it was Zuma who was in charge of the country at the time of the massacre. The security chiefs reported to Zuma and they, not him, killed the miners at Marikana.
If it is not such a major problem, will Ramaphosa stand up and lead this nation. Please?
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