Steven Friedman
WORM’S EYE VIEW
We like politicians who act. We do not seem to like working out whether the actions solve our problems.
Take Minister of Safety and Security Steve Tshwete. With his enthusiastic support, police are “sorting out” inner Johannesburg amid gung-ho statements on the success of the operation and the number of arrests. He has made it clear that he sees this campaign as a sign of his ministry’s new willingness to tackle the problem.
So far, so good. Until we examine what the police are mainly doing in Hillbrow and environs – arresting “illegal” immigrants. That this helps fight crime is accepted, largely without question, by much of the media and quite possibly by the public.
But it may do far less to address the problem than we are being told.
Arresting “illegal” immigrants is the oldest trick in the post-apartheid police book; it plays much the same role as pass raids in the early 1980s. It is fairly easy to do (particularly if, as some reports claim, you are not too careful about whether those arrested are either immigrants or “illegal”) and the figures create the impression of activity and effectiveness. But, like the pass raids, it does little or nothing to reduce crime and may make doing so more difficult.
There is no evidence that immigrants, “illegal” or otherwise, are any more prone to commit crime than locals – police crime statisticians have acknowledged as much. Arresting them merely provides a smokescreen for the police, creating an illusion of effectiveness in which holding someone for being on the wrong side of the border is confused with collaring a real criminal.
So we could see campaigns such as these as the action equivalent of the “tough talk” strategy mentioned in this column recently – it creates the illusion that the government is getting on top of a problem. But recent evidence suggests that, while this may not work as a crime- fighting strategy, it works excellently at making many people feel better about the government.
A recent Human Sciences Research Council poll finds that about 60% of citizens now believe the government has some control over crime – in December 1998, a small majority believed it had lost control. Yet the study, which measured crime not on the basis of police figures but respondents’ answers, found that this new confidence was not accompanied by a drop in crime – around 20% of the population were victims in the past year.
Official figures are more optimistic, finding that murder rates are declining, those of serious crimes such as rape stabilising. The point, however, is that precisely the same people who reported high levels of crime are also more confident about the government’s ability to deal with it. The obvious conclusion is that they are impressed less by what they experience than by the sense that Tshwete and his colleagues are now serious about dealing with the problem.
This does not mean citizens are deluded: the way people feel is often as important as “reality”. Since gloom is a powerful impediment to our progress, ministers who can make people feel better are doing a favour to the country as well as themselves.
But people may be feeling better because they are being sold false remedies – such as harassing immigrants in the belief that this will stem crime. At some point, they will discover that the promised cures do not work and will then begin to feel much worse. The result may be far more despair than we would have had if people had been told that the problem is difficult, that the authorities will do their best to solve it, but that this takes time.
This example holds lessons well beyond the crime problem. The Johannesburg raids are part of a wider pattern in the government and among opinion-formers which seems to have rubbed off on to many citizens – an obsession with “delivery”, assiduously fed by government leaders, which is not matched by overmuch attention to what is being delivered.
“Delivery” is what we are consistently promised and what we repeatedly demand. In itself, that is healthy – it means the government is committing itself to serving us and we are demanding that it does. But “delivery” now comes with a baggage which may do more to set us back than move us forward.
It has come to mean that we want deeds, not words – that the government should be measured by whether it does things, not by whether it agonises over what to do. So we are promised – and demand – less discussion on what our problems are and how we should deal with them, more signs that the government is doing things about them. We are encouraged to caricature the period after 1994 as one in which the government asked everyone what they thought, and appointed policy teams to ponder what it should do, ensuring that nothing was done – and the present as a time when an action-oriented, businesslike government stops talking and gets on with the job.
But, as the Johannesburg raids show, action is pointless unless it addresses the real problem – it cannot do that unless we continue to talk about what that might be. And, since noEone has all the answers, we need as many voices in the discussion as we can get.
There are other examples. Many in business are delighted with a government willing to act on its economic strategy – few pause to consider whether it will actually produce growth and jobs. The government wins cheers for subsidising many houses – far less thought is given to whether these meet the needs of those who live in them or help develop poor areas. In these and other cases, “delivery” drowns out questions about whether we need what is delivered.
For the government, the message is that the distinction between talk and action which many of its leaders seem to draw is false. The more it travels down the current road of acting in the hope that this will stop the talking, the more problems it will create for itself when the actions do not work but the talking has stopped.
For citizens, the lesson is that we cannot take “delivery” at face value. A government that is doing things is only better than one that is not if what it does is likely to ensure improvements. The media, citizens’ organisations – all of us – need to remain as critical of the products of delivery as many were about past inaction.
Yes, we need government action. But “delivery” without continuing discussion of its purpose and wisdom could become more of a threat to our future than its guarantee.