Khadija Magardie
crossfire
‘Invisible politicians aren’t of much use to anyone.” Aptly said, by one of literature’s most acerbic characters, Jimmy Porter. Of course, the anti-hero of John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger was musing about the talents of his aspirant politician brother-in-law and had not met the likes of South Africa’s own wonder, Minister of Safety and Security Steve (Bad Attitude) Tshwete.
The recent palaver over a plot to overthrow President Thabo Mbeki provided yet another chance for Tshwete to come out with guns blazing, embarrassing the ruling party’s alliance partners and the country in the process.
The cloak-and-dagger approach and announcing the names of alleged plotters on national TV were hardly surprising from a Cabinet minister who has made gung-ho his forte.
His supporters would argue that being a gentleman-at-arms at the Union Buildings, he was merely performing his duties.
What is, however, surprising is that the African National Congress, which has in recent times stepped up its whining about its bad image in the press, does not appear to have considered the merits of putting a stopper on Tshwete whose public image has come to be associated more with bizarre sound bites than the credible image expected of someone heading his portfolio.
When it comes to laconism, nobody beats our minister. A brief glance at his CV on the ANC’s website will tell you that included in his illustrious career is taking a degree in English and philosophy (date unknown) and serving as army commissar of Umkhonto weSizwe in Zambia in the Eighties. Which perhaps explains things. The minister is confused between his role as eminent reader of Chaucer and an army man.
It also explains why he alternates, without prior warning, between academic deadpan and military pitch. But it is what he says that is cause for concern. His lacklustre stint as minister of sport and recreation should have taught him that South Africans take things like soccer and crime rather seriously. And that an unfortunate remark here or there could be used by certain elements in society to be dismissive of serious issues, or, even worse, to galvanise the gatvol into taking unlawful action.
Tshwete’s pontifications have exposed him to public ridicule, reluctant grunts of agreement and open adulation, depending on which circles one moves in.
Among those aggrieved by the minister, the women of this country would spring to mind. Earlier this year, at a ceremony in the Eastern Cape, Tshwete announced there were “many criminals among us and most of them are women”. This was later denied, of course.
The ire of the women, even those abroad, was also heaped on him last year when, together with Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development Penuell Maduna, he appeared on the United States TV programme 60 Minutes to discuss the issue of rape. Strutting like popinjays, the pair infamously remarked: “Well, we’ve been standing here for 26 seconds and nobody has been raped.”
He once again hampered international relations last April when he declared authoritatively that “in most crimes, there are aliens involved”. Making no distinction between illegal immigrants and the thousands of refugees and asylum-seekers in the country, he proceeded to list the culprits. “The Chinese are stripping our coasts naked of perlemoen and are involved in trafficking [sic] women and children,” he said.
And then the Portuguese were targeted this year. After submitting a memorandum to the minister expressing their fears that crime was escalating, the Portuguese community in South Africa were astounded by the response. They were accused of not assisting to overthrow apartheid …
But where the Lord may have a measure of success with his terrible swift sword, Tshwete’s mouth may prove his own undoing. “We will deal with criminals as a bulldog deals with a bull,” he told a police gathering in Jabulani in 1999. “We must show them no mercy,” he waxed on at another function that same year.
The bombings in the Western Cape provided endless cannon fodder for “Tshweteisms”.
Someone should have perhaps reminded Tshwete of the dubiousness of flying out the security apparatus of our fledgling democracy to “our Algerian friends”, to learn their methods. Indeed not a wise comparison with a country whose human rights record is as dismal as the death toll from its brutal civil war is high.
But his clincher, which has earned him the admiration of, among others, the Federal Alliance, came last year: “Criminals must know that the South African state possesses all the authority, moral and political, to ensure that by all means, constitutional or unconstitutional the people of this country are not deprived of their human rights.” So much for respect for the law.
For a country coming out of a past that trampled on the rights of its citizens, the pearls of wisdom may make Tshwete the people’s hero, but they hold unlikely prospects for encouraging people to, for instance, join community policing forums, instead of assembling lynch mobs in the backyard.
The minister’s problem is that he is vague. Vague not on what he thinks of crime, but on what he actually plans to do about it. To borrow yet again the wit of Porter: “His knowledge of life and ordinary human beings is so hazy, he really deserves some sort of decoration for it a medal inscribed ‘For vaguery in the field’.”
Not that we are any better off … This is after all the man who threw a blanket around the country’s crime statistics, describing them as, among other things, bizarre. The chilling reality is that, with absolutely no public information on whether hijackings, rapes, murders and robberies are down or up, we, as citizens, don’t even know just how scared to be.
Imitating Robocop is nothing but a short-term strategy designed to dupe the public into believing that something is in fact getting done when the bitter truth is that Tshwete’s department cannot trust even its own crime statistics.
Managing a portfolio that encompasses the safety and security of the country means balancing the need to be seen as taking a strong, uncompromising stance on crime with being responsible enough to know that spontaneous utterances calling criminals “sub-human”, who don’t deserve rights, could well be taken seriously.