Be careful what you wish for — you might just get it. That, for me, was the sad lesson of Thabo Mbeki’s State of the Nation address. He was bludgeoned into making the right noises about crime, and neither he nor the South African public is any the better for it.
A colleague remarked afterwards that Mbeki did not seem to have written the speech himself. Comments from other ANC leaders in its wake strongly suggest he was advised to kill off the storm over his earlier remark that crime was not out of control.
In one of his most striking retreats to date, he called crime ‘ugly†and ‘repulsive†and said South Africans cannot enjoy the fruits of freedom in a crime-ridden society.
But for all the realism of his speech, it lacked soul. We lost a poet, but gained a pragmatist. Bitter, venomous comments by Safety and Security Minister Charles Nqakula and Defence Minister Mosioua Lekota in the parliamentary debate following Mbeki’s address indicated that the government still does not believe it deserves all the blame directed at it.
Nqakula echoed Mbeki’s oft-repeated line that more than 80% of murders involve people who know each other and that police officers cannot reasonably be expected to be inside every home, shebeen and other private spaces.
Informing this thinking is the belief that certain elements, including the media and the opposition, are helping to create a siege mentality when the truth is that crime is not that bad, except for certain high-profile, violent offences.
To quote Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s remarks in Parliament this week: ‘Part of this syndrome has also been an often unexpressed apologetic attitude, suggesting that crime is an inevitable by-product of poverty and that it affects only a privileged few.â€
The perception is that people are being incited against the government, using crime as a pretext, and that real concern would express itself in participation in community policing forums and the mobilisation of communities to expose criminals in their midst. Taken to its logical conclusion, the argument is that anyone who opts out of these forums while continuing to complain about crime lacks all credibility.
During the parliamentary debate, an ANC MP said it appeared critics were trying to create an impression that rampant crime was a product of the ANC government.
Yes, the president outmanoeuvred the opposition, which was left clutching at straws. Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon was reduced to quibbling about the order of Mbeki’s speech, saying South Africans wanted the issue at the top of the agenda and not in the middle. The African Christian Democratic Party’s excitable leader, Kenneth Meshoe, was reduced to hollow warnings about Fifa withdrawing the World Cup because of crime.
But Mbeki was right to say that the crime challenge is not a reflection of policy shortcomings. So, he was left to mutter the obvious: increase the number of police officers, improve their working conditions, improve our crime intelligence, maximise the use of technology and so on.
Political analyst Steven Friedman commented that he had never seen Mbeki so lacking in confidence and so uncomfortable. This was because it was not his show — he was responding to pressure.
Is that what we want? Is there any reason to believe the government’s attitude towards crime has changed? We asked Mbeki to acknowledge unequivocally that crime is a problem and he obliged. But where does that leave us?