I am writing this on Monday 27 April 2020. This is the date every year on which we remember South Africa’s turn to democracy, and how, on this day in 1994, we began the process of voting for the country’s first non-racial government. The images of snaking queues of this wonderful country’s diverse people lining up to cast their ballots is one etched in our history and memory. It’s a proud moment in our history and a good memory.
Less well remembered is that 27 April 1994 was also the date on which the interim constitution came into being. This established South African constitutional supremacy; a set of rules for governance and guarantees to the country’s people. This is important, for it is the idea that this date embodies that constitutes our ‘freedom’ as much as the exercise of the franchise. Each of us, as citizens of South Africa – and in large measure, also those who do not hold citizenship of the country, but who by dint of circumstance find themselves in it – are endowed with a suite of liberties and protections that the state may only interfere with on exceptional grounds.
And so it is with some irony that I am composing this piece at my dining room table. My office is closed, as are most other places that might serve as an alternative. As for browsing in a bookstore, or getting hold of the latest Terminator movie, forget it.
There is an uncomfortable atmosphere in the country, about the pandemic, and about so much more. There is fear of infection certainly. But there is also the insecurity of not knowing how to comport oneself when venturing out, not when there’s a chance of being stopped at a roadblock and being required to justify one’s presence. How to do that? Some attention was recently paid to a diabetic man in Somerset West who was fined R2 500 for not being able to prove that he was in fact going to collect his medication. I personally know someone who needed to produce receipts to prove that he had been shopping – what he would have done had he been stopped on the way to the supermarket is unclear.
Indeed, while the conduct of the security forces has probably, for the most part, been decent under difficult circumstances, there have been enough instances of abuse – humiliating and sometimes lethal – to warrant concern.
More than that, we need to be worried about the conduct of some of those in authority. This is not just about the bombast and the lackadaisical attitude that some have shown toward abuses; there are those who are finding their enhanced powers uncomfortably exhilarating. We need to be concerned when the chief of the defence force tells his troops that they are not to let civilians disrespect them, and that ‘no individual human right’ can compare to people’s lives.
Even more distressing is the remark from a group of parliamentarians from the ruling party that the Bill of Rights has been suspended. It has not, but this expresses volumes.
One need not even oppose the lockdown, or question the official assessment of the threat that the Covid-19 pandemic poses, to see the dangers here. Be under no illusions: these sentiments represent a perversion of the constitutional relationship between the citizens and the state. And the past few weeks have given us a small (I emphasise that, small and far from complete, although I’d hardly like to see anything more substantial) taste of what governance by repression and with degraded constitutionalism looks like.
Yet as concerning as this is, I wonder if it should be our dominant concern as we reflect on South Africa as a free society.
Over the past few days, I’ve seen the occasional stroller, dog walker and cyclist go by (not, by the way, limited to any racial group). No, I don’t approve. Each of us is under stress and must handle it as best we can. Violating the law strikes me as more than illegal; it is self-indulgent.
Yet I am more concerned by the superciliousness and self-righteousness that is catching on. I mean the earnest Facebook posts from suburbanites encouraging one another to report on errant joggers and motorists. ‘If you see someone breaking the lockdown, phone this number!!!!’ I have to wonder how one can really tell the difference between someone out for a furtive breath of fresh air from someone legitimately on the way to buy bread and milk. But maybe I miss the point…
And then there has been the effusive praise heaped on the government and on President Ramaphosa. The issue is not that people – evidently a sizeable number of them – might approve of his performance, but the form it is taking. The former parliamentary leader of a ‘liberal’ party greets the president’s announcement extending the lockdown with a tweet affirming that ‘we are led’, followed by a thankful hands emoji. School children are asked by their teacher to write letters thanking the President for keeping them safe by locking down the country. We have to ask if we are acting as free citizens of a constitutional democracy or as frightened subjects seeking the protection of a benevolent overlord?
Personally, what I find most ominous is the initiative taken by government, media organisations and some in civil society to police the media to root out ‘fake news’. ‘Arrests have already been made, and they will continue if people persist in spreading fake news,’ the government helpfully reminded us. This is an odd thing for news groups to endorse; although perhaps it’s not, given that some journalists have taken it upon themselves to go beyond reporting on (alleged, or presumed) violations to policing them through cellphone footage uploaded to social media, and tagging the police and presidency.
Media Monitoring Africa, in related developments, is putting together a ‘Spotter Network’, encouraging people to sign up and patrol the online world to ‘help combat disinformation, hate speech and more’. Disinformation and hate speech are themselves hardly uncontested terrain. But that ‘and more’ is a chilling thing – a mandate, potentially, as wide as the busybody impulses and ideological predispositions of its ‘Spotters’ might wish to stretch them. This is high moral octane stuff.
So is the notion that it will aim at ‘dispelling false narratives’. What does this mean? Are we looking at something beyond whether this or that is factual and whether it fits into a worldview? Do we go from ‘this is false’, to ‘this is right-wing’?
I’m not denying the problem of misinformation or ‘mal-information’. I have no easy answers for it. (In my own work on land politics, I encounter a great deal of it, whether produced out of malice or incompetence.) But it seems to me that this is, regrettably, part of the risk we take and the price we pay for living in a free society.
There have been threatening noises (and at times, bald threats) made against a free media by Government since the 1990s. Pretty much every one was made with high-sounding appeals to human rights, accuracy in reporting or the greater good. Beware of that. The gulf between deciding what is ‘false’ and mandating what is ‘true’ is a small one.
A crisis allows what was unthinkable to become attractive. And perhaps now would be the moment when enough of the country would be willing to countenance some media censorship to make it possible. In times like these, the constitutional vision may seem decidedly unattractive.
So, happy Freedom Day! For some, this may well be the happiest of Freedom Days. A limited-use, truncated freedom in whose abridgment – in pursuit of the safety that benevolent authority is assumed to be able to provide – many of us may willingly be complicit.
We are led, after all. But in the words of William Shakespeare, perhaps we ‘will tenderly be led by the nose as asses are.’
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