It’s in the nature of our complex society and its often-contradictory dynamics that the most recognisable representative of the most organised and vocal movement for the dissolution of the country is not legally a South African. This is, of course, Phil Craig, leading light on the movement for the secession of the Western Cape, and soon-to-be delegate for the Cape Independence Advocacy Group to the United States, where he and his colleagues hope to muster support for their political project.
There is a strong strain of nationalism in South Africa’s politics, and the notion that an “outsider” was working to dismantle the country brought down an indignant and wrathful response. A stock demand was that Home Affairs minister, Leon Schreiber, should refuse Craig’s application for citizenship.
That would, of course, be South African citizenship.
Craig has by his account been waiting for years for his application to be processed. His detractors countered that he was unfit to be a citizen of a country whose integrity he was actively campaigning to dismember. Action SA’s Herman Mashaba pointed out that while the Citizenship Act required the applicant to intend to reside permanently in South Africa, he intended to lead a part of South Africa out of the country. He wanted to reside on the same real estate, though not in the same polity. On top of this, he called for Craig to be expelled from South Africa.
“We might have our internal differences, but we always unite when we face threats from outside,” Mashaba wrote, “We cannot afford to sit by and watch outsiders coming here to exploit our differences for treasonous intents.”
Insiders and outsiders
The language of insiders and outsiders around our porous and contested borders is a perennial issue for South Africa. The vitriol directed at Craig follows a number of other controversies around citizenship and the claims on it.
Last year saw the deportation of Janusz Waluś, the man who pulled the trigger on Chris Hani. Waluś had been a naturalised citizen; this status had been revoked (it’s not clear whether this was with or against his consent), on the basis of his role in the assassination.
The Gupta family, originally from India, had also held South African citizenship through naturalisation. As details emerged of the impact of the “state capture” they were implicated in – and after they’d departed the country, beyond the reach of its rickety justice system – loud, frustrated calls followed for the family to be stripped of their South African citizenship.
All of this exists alongside the omnipresent “discussion” around questions of belonging – whether outsiders can ever truly be South African, or “one of us” – which was recently expressed in last year’s Miss SA pageant and the participation of Chidimma Adetshina, a young lady of Nigerian and Mozambican heritage. I discussed this in a previous piece, looking at it from the point of view of citizenship as an expression of national identity and the way a society sees itself.
The cases of Phil Craig, Janusz Waluś, and the Guptas – diverse though they are (and no one has claimed that Craig has harmed anyone or corrupted anything) – speak to something different.
Human community
Max Weber, the great German sociologist, defined the state as a “human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” Its defining feature is that is able to exercise coercive authority, whose weight ultimately falls on the individuals under its aegis, either singly or as part of collectives. They may, at the state’s behest, be imprisoned, their property taken or compelled to leave the territory (or to remain on it).
Societies consent to this because the alternative is likely to be a form of dark anarchy – one in which power is vested in those with the greatest capacity to compel obedience to themselves. In such a situation, economic development and mass society are practically impossible. The state makes an attempt to mitigate this by concentrating that protection (and various other administrative and adjudicating functions) in a set of institutions and to formalise and systematise the exercise of power.
The question then becomes how the potential for abuse in this system (historically, arguably the norm rather than the exception) is to be mitigated. One answer has been to try to build systems of limitation and accountability mechanisms into the state. Democracy is an obvious one, as are the doctrines of the rule of law and judicial independence.
Citizenship is an important part of this. As a word, citizenship is often used as a synonym for nationality, and this is how the discourse around exclusion – “makwerekwere, you don’t belong here” – takes place. But what Phil Craig’s case touches on, and still more so, those of Waluś and the Guptas, is how the state can bring its coercive powers to bear on individuals in a democracy.
Understood in its fullest sense, citizenship cannot exist outside a liberal democratic order. While relationships of belonging, nationality, subjecthood, and other forms of affiliation may exist in relation in other forms of polity, liberal democracy is defined by limitations on the power and discretion of the state.
As William Galston puts it: “This type of political order rests on the republican principle, takes constitutional form, and incorporates the civic egalitarianism and majoritarian principles of democracy. At the same time, it accepts and enforces the liberal principle that the legitimate scope of public power is limited, which entails some constraints on or divergences from majoritarian decision-making.”
Benefits
People enjoying the benefits of citizens have the right to expect protection from state capriciousness and arbitrariness. They also have agency in their dealing with the state. Challenging the latter’s conduct is a prerogative of citizenship. Indeed, citizenship embodies a fundamental entitlement to participate politically in the life of the society.
The latter, typically codified through the franchise and the right to hold electoral office, has been what has distinguished citizenship of a country from residence in it, or a more attenuated communal or ethnic kinship with another state.
Note that in liberal democracies, many of these rights are extended to those lawfully in the country, and not only those holding formal citizenship (call them “nationals”). Some commentators have wanted to expand on this, calling for a post-national view of citizenship, one in which allegiance to countries is downgraded and citizenship itself is reconceptualised as a set of essentially human rights relating to political action. I’m not convinced by this. Polities may not exist in splendid isolation, but territorial boundaries continue to define them; within them, different arrangements prevail, not least in the relationship between the state and the individual. In many cases, perhaps most, true citizenship does not exist.
No, the relationship between a citizen and the state is altogether more powerful than a generic entitlement to participate in the civic space.
Citizenship is the foundation of the individual’s claims to participate in public life in a liberal democracy. The German Jewish (and later American) political historian and theorist, Hannah Arendt – whose own citizenship had been terminated by the Nazis – famously called citizenship “the right to have rights”.
She went on to write: “Man as man has only one right that transcends his various rights as a citizen: the right never to be excluded from the rights granted by his community.”
Citizenship – again, in the liberal democratic tradition – is about a reciprocal relationship between the individual and the state. The individual agrees to subject him- or herself to the authority of then state and to recognise its authority to regulate conduct. Where necessary, the state is accorded the power to use force to do this. The state, for its part, pledges to use these powers within narrow limits, subject to the approval of those under its authority.
This is, clearly, not a relationship of equals. The state can call on resources (and raw power) in a manner that the individual cannot (a fortunate few excepted, such as the super wealthy or hereditary leaders perhaps). Even collectives can seldom match the power that a state can field. And even in the most stable, mature democracies, people being people, such abuses are inevitable.
Sacred contract
For this reason, the relationship must be a strong one, that will endure even in the face of conflict. What I am suggesting is that citizenship needs to be seen as a binding and to all intents and purposes irrevocable contract between the individual and the state. Call this the sacred contract.
It is the existence of this contract that differentiates the citizen from the resident, no matter how free the latter may be to participate in public life.
Nothing presents a greater danger to the individual than being excluded from the political community entirely. Do that, and the claim-by-right on political agency in the society is torn out from under the erstwhile citizen. He or she is then, at best, a resident existing on the implied or explicit sufferance of the state, or at worst an effective “non-person” going forward.
This is true whether the route to citizenship is through accident of birth or heritage, or whether it is granted through a process of lawful application (naturalisation).
For this reason, the deprivation of citizenship is matter of the utmost gravity and should be approached with appropriate caution. Where it is proposed as a means of retribution – as in the case of Waluś or the Guptas – it would no doubt give immense satisfaction to many from whose polity the alleged wrongdoer is being expelled. It’s a potent way of saying that his or her conduct is of such weight and malevolence that he or she is no longer “one of us”. I can certainly understand the sentiment.
Janusz Waluś, for instance. killed a leading light of the African National Congress and South African Communist Party. I have no sympathy for either, and a complex view of Chris Hani; but it shouldn’t be forgotten that Waluś committed murder, and his actions were intended to stoke a civil war. All told, I feel very little for him, and I would have been indifferent to whether or not he was ever released (except perhaps as a matter of procedural justice). Yet to see him stripped of his South African citizenship and deported left me uncomfortable.
Lawfully naturalised citizen
Hate Waluś’s deed – hate Waluś, if you must – but he lived in South Africa as a lawfully naturalised citizen. In other words, he and the state had entered into the sacred contract. The state was well within its rights and duties to punish him – he was initially sentenced to death, and was saved by the abolition of that penalty, an ironic advantage to him of the transition be tried to prevent. But to deprive him of his citizenship carries with it the implication that ultimately, the relationship of citizenship remains less a binding contract than a benevolent concession. Accepting this is to concede a foundational premise of the rights of all. It sets a dreadful precedent.
As the United States Supreme Court said in a 1958 ruling, to use the deprivation of citizenship as a means of punishment amounted to the “total destruction of the individual’s status in organised society.” To allow it to be used like this is, in my view, to cheapen the idea of citizenship, and to endanger all of us.
South Africa is not alone in facing this problem. Many Western democracies are having to reckon with sizeable numbers of young people who have decamped to engage in conflicts abroad, and later seek to return home. These are invariably people motivated by politicised religion, and a deep-rooted hostility to the countries from which they hail.
Their experiences abroad have often hardened their views and equipped them with dangerous skills. It’s become a major security headache. Depriving such people of their citizenship, and hence their rights to live in and work in their home societies, has been mooted as a possible solution.
More than being mooted, it has been done. One of the most high-profile cases was the “ISIS Bride”, Shamima Begum. Having left the UK in 2015 for Syria, she had married a Dutch jihadi, and borne three children, none of whom lived long. As the self-described Caliphate collapsed, she was interned in a refugee camp and came to the attention of journalists. The then-British Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, promptly stripped her of her citizenship.
This was made possible under UK law by the fact that she had a claim on Bangladeshi citizenship and would therefore not be rendered stateless. The Bangladeshi authorities replied that they wanted no part of her, and she remains in the refugee centre.
Here again, I have no sympathy with this young lady. The horrors that ISIS perpetrated beggar belief, and there is some evidence that she was an enthusiastic participant in its reign of terror. Yet for the reasons spelt out above, I also feel uneasy about the actions of the UK government.
In both these cases, there is the additional consideration that citizenship is vulnerable where it is acquired by application, and where the holder has the citizenship of another country to fall back on. (This has enabled governments to skirt the consequences of rendering people stateless.) But this also implies that multiple tiers of citizenship exist, that there is something superior in citizenship conferred by birth or on those with a strong ancestral connection.
Not just or viable
This is not to my mind a just or viable distinction to make. If citizenship mediates rights in a state, it needs to extend these equally to all – for otherwise, what are at stake are not rights, but conditional privileges. Make the requirements for citizenship stringent ones, but once lawfully conferred and accepted, there should be no distinction drawn between those holding it as a result of an accident of birth or by conscious adoption.
This is a matter of some importance in the case of the Gupta family, since doubts exist around the validity of their acquisition of South African citizenship. If this is the case, it would seem very simple: if the process was compromised, the sacred contract never existed in the first place. It would be void. But this is a far cry for using citizenship as a tool of punishment, as some had demanded.
Which brings things back to Phil Craig. I am deeply uncomfortable with the nativism evident in the attacks on him. This is a part of our political culture with a very dark underside, and whose consequences are not infrequently measured in blood and fire.
Moreover, he has lived legally in South Africa, and by all accounts built a life here. I would have no difficulty believing that he has probably made a net positive contribution to the country during the period of his residence. Odd or divisive views and involvement in activism are within the ambit of the law that all residents are entitled to, and are not grounds for expulsion.
There are probably millions of South Africans who hold abominable opinions or engage in dreadful behaviour. More than a few of them have risen to high office. Craig is hardly anything like the worst we have to offer.
Yet citizenship is a different matter. It bespeaks a far deeper and more profound connection to the state, and the reciprocal obligations involved. Craig has been commendably honest about his own goals, and entering any relationship with the South African state would seem to be self-evidently temporary and opportunistic. Such would also cheapen citizenship. For him, the sacred contract would not be sacred at all.
South Africans are fortunate to live in a society in which proper citizenship is possible, and this is so, irrespective of the crisis into which ideology, venality and incompetence have dragged their country. Citizenship should be understood for the valuable, sacred, thing that it is. Perhaps more than anything, there needs to be renewed appreciation for the centrality of citizenship to the functioning of a free society, how it binds people to one another and to the state – but also binds the state to them and requires it to comport itself accordingly. This is an ongoing project.
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