Dragging the political rot into the light

THE Moerane commission of inquiry into political killings in KwaZulu-Natal has dragged the most disturbing part of our political rot into the light.

The country was gripped by moving accounts of intimidation and murder carried out with impunity.

South Africa has a very serious problem with political violence and the problem is overwhelmingly concentrated in KwaZulu-Natal.

In a 2013 report, respected researcher David Bruce counted at least 450 political murders in the province. This is a massive humanitarian and political crisis - and a serious threat to the future of our already compromised democracy.

Many of the murders are intra-party and related to the access to opportunities for personal accumulation rather than political ideology.

Power battles within the ANC are responsible for many of the deaths. But there has also been intra-party conflict, notably between the IFP and the NFP, and between these parties and the ANC.

There have also been murders that seem to be about political ideology. The SACP, the National Union of Metalworkers and Abahlali baseMjondolo, all organisations on the left of the political spectrum and strongly critical of President Jacob Zuma’s ANC, were also subject to death threats and murders.

Political violence was most extreme at the Glebelands Hostel in uMlazi where a staggering 89 people have died - without a single conviction.

If 89 people were murdered in London, or Sandton, it would be all over our media. But the carnage at Glebelands has not been placed at the centre of our public sphere.

The reason for this is simple: our society remains committed to the colonial logic in which some lives are fungible.

Grass-roots activists and organisations, notably Abahlali baseMjondolo, as well as international human rights organisations, such as Amnesty International, have warned about the culture of intimidation and violence in KZN for years.

But these warnings generally were not taken seriously in a public sphere that is deeply elitist. There were also deliberate attempts to undermine the credibility of people speaking up against political violence, sometimes through attempts at character assassination.

When Abahlali baseMjondolo was attacked in the Kennedy Road settlement in 2009, they were subjected to a sophisticated propaganda campaign that persuaded many, including a number of academics, that their claims were false.

However research by a Harvard academic, and later a long trial, showed that the claims made by the movement were correct.

All the evidence confirms that they were attacked and driven from their homes by a group of men identifying themselves as ANC and that party officials and police officers were complicit in the attack.

The nature of the link between people producing propaganda in support of state repression and those carrying out violence on the ground needs to be carefully examined.

For those of us old enough to remember the 1980s, the political violence that has become so prevalent in KZN, and is steadily spreading to other parts of the country, takes us right back to the heart of a terrible past.

The demise of apartheid was supposed to put an end to political violence and usher in a new era of human rights. We have all those rights in law, but the reality is that for many the laws mean nothing in practice. We will not be able to make the human rights culture, to which our constitution commits us, a reality without serious political commitment.

That commitment requires the police, the criminal justice system and the ruling party to be subject to effective oversight. It requires difficult decisions to be taken, and powerful people to be taken on.

There are good people in the ANC, the police and the criminal justice system. But the rot is also systemic. If the rot was not systemic, it would not be possible for 89 to have been murdered at Glebelands without a conviction.

What is required to deal with this problem of political violence head on is to bring in a top police and prosecution team from outside the province, perhaps including international experts.

That team must be assured of its independence, given all the necessary resources and able to investigate without fear or favour.

It is not just the assassins on the ground who need to be investigated, prosecuted and convicted. It is also the politicians, police officers, people in the criminal justice system, the intelligence agencies - and those who have promoted propaganda in support of repression - that need to be subject to credible investigation.

The whole network of power that allowed the murders to take place, usually without consequence, must be exposed.

No-one must be spared. This is the only way to root out the rot.

Factions in the ANC will do everything in their power to avoid a far-reaching and effective response to the crisis. For this reason, those who are charged with responding to this crisis, and the rest of us, need to understand that confronting the rot and taking effective action to end it will require courage and the building of broad consensus in support of this action.

Most mornings we wake up to further news about Gupta-related corruption. This information is vital to our public sphere, and to the work of restoring the democratic credibility of the state. But there is a real problem when the rot is only understood in terms of corruption.

Corruption is a serious problem. It makes it impossible to use the state as a tool for achieving social justice. But political murder, and on a staggering scale, is an even more serious problem.

Civil society and the media need to take this problem at least as seriously as the problem of state capture and corruption.

Amabungane need to be investigating these murders. We need to be on the streets, in our thousands, demanding an end to political violence and a genuine commitment to all of the human rights enshrined in our constitution.

It has become fashionable among some of the “Fallists”, as well people committed to various kinds of authoritarian nationalism, some of which is openly right-wing, to disparage our constitution.

This is exceptionally dangerous. The alternative to the protection of human rights is not social justice; it is elites using violent repression against the most vulnerable people in our society.

We are in a a serious crisis. The way out of it is to renew our commitment to democracy and human rights, and give teeth to our constitution.

The Moerane commissioners hold the future of our democracy in their hands. They dare not fail.

* Buccus is senior research associate at ASRI, research fellow at UKZN School of Social Sciences and academic director of a university study abroad programme on political transformation.