How far is SA from total banditry?

With the country’s many problems, which seem to continuously multiply, it's no surprise we often can't see the wood for the trees. Here’s what should be a concern for us: could SA become a country controlled by bandits, with all of us, individuals and corporate citizenry, living and conducting business at the mercy of gang lords? 

Far-fetched? Think again. All around us are the telltale signs that the state is losing the battle to hold the line between social order and anarchy.

The weaknesses and faults of the criminal justice system, highlighted by the large number of crimes, including serious ones, that go unsolved and unpunished, are now the stuff of legends. But nothing underlines the powerlessness of our state more than its failure — a full-year later, and there have been no arrests and punishment of those behind last July’s devastating riots, despite the bombastic promises of officials.

Apart from damage to property, the unrest undermined confidence in the state’s ability to discharge its duty to protect life and property — to enforce the rules by which we all are obliged to live. So much so that we talk about a repeat of the mayhem as a given. We question loudly how the state will respond next time. 

As the state loses its grip, criminals have become emboldened in their illegal activities. The vacuum caused by the state’s paralysis is being occupied by gangs who increasingly act with impunity.

In addition, a lack of faith in police and the state has given birth to groups such as Operation Dudula and similar vigilante formations in Soweto, Alexandra and elsewhere.

Recently, columnist Lukhona Mnguni sounded the alarm on the activities of criminal gangs in Western Cape townships, and how they may want to pervert our democracy by influencing voting. He described how in one township residents who wanted to report crime were redirected by police to gangsters to have their problems solved. His was a living-hell story of citizens negligently abandoned to criminality by their own government.

Serious as this is, what should be of broader concern is that the state has over many years allowed the Western Cape’s gang problem to fester and become entrenched. The gangs in question are responsible for not only extorting money from residents, but for mass killings as well.

Another indicator of the state’s diminishing control is what has happened to many of the country’s inner-cities and central business districts. As formal businesses and the rich have fled to presumably safer localities, CBDs have turned into urban slums, with the authorities wilfully turning a blind eye.

We have now reached a stage where, in many places, the authorities can enforce policing only with overwhelming force — no land for the bobby on the beat, this

This is where criminal syndicates rule the roost. Unimpeded, they hijack buildings and turn them into dens of illegal activities, including drug and human trafficking.

But even businesses operating away from the dilapidated town centres have not escaped the clutches of criminal gangs. Ask the construction industry, which has for a long time complained about harassment by the so-called construction mafias. In this case, too, the state has proved incapable or unwilling to do its job, leaving businesses with the unenviable choice of either abandoning projects or breaking the law by yielding to the criminal demands of the gangs.

We have now reached a stage where, in many places, the authorities can enforce what passes for policing only with overwhelming force, such as through the army or heavily armed police units — no land for the bobby on the beat, this. It is an approach that is unsustainable, given the combination of limited resources and the country’s spreading lawlessness.

Some of us, faced with the discomfiting reality of a country battling to keep things from falling apart, will default to denying the possibility that we, “the rainbow people” of Nelson Mandela, could become a dysfunctional, gang-infested and failed society. Such people might question how a democratic country, with a reputedly world-class constitution, could succumb to unbridled banditry.

After all, doesn't the constitution guarantee the human rights and freedoms of everyone?

But the collapse of law and order will render the constitution, the rules by which our society is ordered, and by which we are obliged to abide, irrelevant. Of what value will the constitution and its laws be if they cannot be enforced?  

Looking at the shenanigans in a place like Khayelitsha, suburban SA might smugly dismiss the criminality as a uniquely township problem, a difficulty meant only for the poor. But it may not be long before the criminal syndicates come to the suburbs in search of richer pickings, by way of kidnappings or plain extortion. And by then, in Martin Niemöller's words, there will no-one to speak for them.

Unless the march of criminality is stopped in its tracks, SA will join other countries, such as Mexico, where, because of the government’s inability to assert its authority, it surrenders to criminal gangs both territory and the right to rule, leaving citizens to the mercy of organised criminal enterprises.

The country will be carved up and divided in an unholy alliance between corrupt police and other state officials, the gangs of the Cape Flats, the “construction mafia” and political bandits ... Upright officials, such the late Babita Deokaran, will be killed or cowed into looking the other way. The gangs will set up checkpoints to extort a “protection tax” from all of us.

In many parts of the country, we already oblige these gangsters.

The state’s inability to assert its authority and enforce the laws is, undermining our constitutional dispensation and putting all of us in peril.