On the Daily Friend Show podcast recently, one of my colleagues, Sara Gon, joked that we needed to ensure civilians were armed to protect the police. As we saw the chaotic events unfold, you’d be forgiven for taking that suggestion very seriously indeed.
This week we saw the entire foolish façade of the ANC, that has been built up for many years, come crashing down in an instant, the lie of the “New Dawn” shattering as his highness, Cyril Ramaphosa, was revealed to be stark naked.
Every foolish policy, from BEE (Blatant Elite Enrichment) to socialist anti-growth policies like EWC, to crippling taxes and anti-job legislation, every governance failure such as our rampant corruption, gutted police, and poor service delivery as well as every dirty political trick, such as racial mobilization and class warfare rhetoric came home to roost this month. South Africans from the poor and desperate to the rich and most greedy, took to the streets to engage in an almost nihilistic grab for resources and an orgy of destruction, arson, and vandalism. Looting and rioting like this is often described as being “the language of the unheard” or the “boiling over of poverty”, but there seemed a remarkable lack of anger by the law breakers, or in fact much fear.
Paper-thin barrier
People had seen through the paper-thin barrier of law and order in South Africa, there was nothing to deter them from getting in on the action.
Police were overwhelmed and, in many cases, simply abandoned neighbourhoods to their fate while the army was nowhere to be seen. In some areas police would arrive to drive off looters and as soon as they left to another area the looters would return.
Just as it seemed hopeless, just as South Africa looked doomed to drift into anarchic decay, the “moderate middle”, that often-silent group of South Africans who make up the majority across our race and class divides stood up and stepped into the space left behind by the inert state.
Videos quickly emerged of middle-class suburbanites of all races defending their neighbourhoods from mobs using everything from golf clubs to shotguns. Some of the incidents are detailed below:
Armed Civilians Open Fire on Mob In South Africa
One shop managed to fend off looters by using cooking oil to make it impossible to get into the shop because the floor was too slippery.
‘They were slipping like crazy’: Smart cooking oil stunt saves Shoprite from looting
‘I will die for my community’: Taxi drivers fight back against looters
And in Diepsloot township residents went door to door with police recovering looted items.
In the aftermath of destruction, many volunteers from all walks of life came together to clean up shopping centres and repair damage caused by the riots. Others used social media to organize donations to provide food and supplies to the people now without livelihoods and to try and head off a potential food crisis which may result from the destruction of so much of the supply chain.
Power of the moderate middle
The moderate middle, inert and inactive for so much of the last decade, could finally take no more of the state’s failure and stood up, showing its power.
Of course, this is still not how things should be; in no society should thieves be shot dead on the streets by civilians desperately trying to hold off mobs. In a properly functional society those who stole and vandalized should be arrested by the police and stand trial.
And yet ordinary people acting in self-defence saved South Africa from even worse violence and destruction and we should be extremely grateful that so many were not only willing to risk themselves, but also that so many had the tools to do it. Something which likely wouldn’t have been possible had the Firearms Control Act amendment, which would ban firearms for self-defence, been passed into law already.
We were brought to this point of great crisis by a government so attached to control and its out-of-date ideology that it pursued its revolutionary agenda believing that somehow it could go on forever without reality coming down on its head. Well, the ANC is reaping what it has sown and for the first time in a long time has been forced to deal with reality, thanking the ordinary people and members of the private sector who had stood up when it had failed.
The government must not repeat its mistakes of the past now. First off it must abandon its attempts to disarm civilians, the same civilians to whom it owes much. It must also tone down rhetoric around race and class and stop mobilizing support on the bases of these antagonisms. Furthermore, it must immediately work to fix the underlying causes of these riots by adopting pro-growth and pro-employment policies which will alleviate the poverty and desperation which fuelled so much of the violence.
The events of the last week will leave many scars. Most concerning to me is the apparent rise in tensions between black and Indian South Africans in KwaZulu-Natal. And yet despite all the horror, for the first time in many years, the sight of so many South Africans standing up for themselves and the country has given me a great deal of hope for South Africa’s future.
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