Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya
LAST Thursday I happened to be at The Star newspaper’s Sauer Street office in the Johannesburg CBD. In no time there was a noise of protest coming ever closer towards the building.
It was members of the SA Municipal Workers Union (Samwu) on strike after promised salary increments did not reflect on their salary slips and subsequent negotiations to solve the impasse collapsed.
The marchers had set their eyes on the ANC’s Luthuli House headquarters on the other side of the street from The Star building.
When they got to Luthuli House, they started dumping garbage at the entrance of the building named after the ANC leader and the first black South African to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Then they started stoning the windows of The Star building when they noticed the journalists and other staff taking pictures.
The sight of ANC office workers standing wistfully as Samwu members started a fire in front of their building – the building a certain Julius Malema once described as a “Revolutionary House”, pointed to just how much the ANC was paralysed to handle protests, especially if they came from those styling themselves as fellow revolutionary travellers.
To be fair to ANC staff, not even the Johannesburg metro police, who arrived as the fire was smouldering, could do anything about the strikers crossing the line.
Like a stray dog, they were chased away and left with their tails between their legs.
I wondered to myself if the Luthuli House leadership only intended to act depending on the size of the fire. I ask myself whether the ANC leadership wants to see Luthuli House itself go up in flames before they realise that the culture of violent protest diminishes our very humanity?
I was reminded that by the time Samwu workers started a small fire, the people of Mandeni in northern KwaZulu-Natal had earlier in the week started a big fire at the local KwaSithebe Industrial Park. A real conflagration.
They had burnt down factories and cars, all because they did not like former mayor Bheki Magwaza being returned as a candidate on a ward councillor list. They also held a school and a clinic to ransom in the process.
You would think the sensible thing would be to not vote for the fellow instead of destroying businesses and jobs.
When police did arrest some 122 people for public violence, arson and malicious damage to property, their comrades threatened more destruction if they were not released unconditionally. They are now free.
It has become far too easy to start a violent protest in South Africa. Surely there must be something wrong with a society where people go to the media, talk openly and in their own names about how they plan to commit more acts of violent crime unless government does as they want it to do.
I am not calling for “concomitant action” as per what Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa called for leading to the Marikana Massacre. I am saying the right to protest must be within the parameters of the law and of common decency.
The Marikana mass murder – for that is what it was – will forever remain a blight in the memory of the democratic South Africa.
That however does not mean that law enforcement must now be abandoned for fear that another Marikana might occur.
It means that the police must refine their law enforcement tactics to respond to the reality that South Africans have a right to protest and withdraw their labour.
I also appreciate that protests must cause some inconvenience if they are to be effective. If everybody can carry on with their lives as if nothing has happened, then it would be pointless to protest.
But there must be a line which, once crossed, changes the protester to a criminal.
The current state of affairs gives democracy a bad name. It now appears to many that democracy means that people can do as they like when they like and face no consequences for that.
The problem with this mindset is that it enables those who will offer less freedom in exchange for a sense of order and predictability. I have said it before and I will repeat it, a lackadaisical approach to the rule of law and order is bad for democracy’s future. It breeds a desire for a “strongman” who will put everyone in their place.
So returning to the respect of law, recognising the extent and limits of the right to protest will be an act of preserving our democracy. Putting its foot down on violent and criminal protest will be the ANC acting in defence of democracy and its own role of freeing South Africans from the rule based on might is right.
Hopefully, the party leaders will not have to wait to see Luthuli House go up in flames before they realise that.