“We protested here for almost seven weeks without a single window being broken and now look at our city – it has been destroyed.” – Lesotho opposition representative
Mamelo Morrison, quoted in Business Day
The quotation says it all. The Lesotho invasion would be laughable if it did not involve the loss of lives and the destruction of so much property. Here, after all, we had a little Ruritania whose Byzantine internal politics produced “crises”, unfathomable to most outsiders, as regularly as clockwork, which affected no one beyond its borders and precious few within.
It is a country (we might say “kingdom”, but one is never sure from one moment to the next with Lesotho) which is totally vulnerable to us – as we well knew since, in an act of great cynicism, the apartheid regime throttled it with a go-slow by border officials, reducing it to its knees within a matter of days. But, ridiculous though the excursion across the border may have been, its seriousness for our fledgling nation should not be under- estimated.
Here, after all, is an opportunity to test whether the Constitution represents the idealism of a small group of unrepresentative academics, or the aspirations of a people. Why did the Constitution fail us, or did we fail the Constitution? Those are the central questions which now need to be the subject of immediate post-mortem and a national debate if the dream of a “new South Africa” is to survive the blundering which landed us with this humiliation.
It is a debate to which we should be able to bring the immensely rich storehouse of experience which is our recent history. The questions which need answering are obvious, but bear articulating.
Why was a regional leader, who can by no means claim to be representative of the country as a whole, holding executive power when the decision to invade was taken and to what extent did he consult with the president? What were the demands on the president and the deputy president which necessitated their being out of the country simultaneously? (An examination of their foreign flights in recent months might contribute to a pertinent debate on the responsibilities of our leaders to rule us, as opposed to indulging in fantasies about ruling the rest of the world.)
What precisely were our obligations and rights to invade a neighbouring territory under treaty and international law? Were the constitutional safeguards, intended to ensure that the ambitions of those unsettled by power do not lead the country unnecessarily into war, complied with – and, if they were, are they adequate?
What, exactly, led up to the invasion? In particular, was the Langa commission doctored, why did we take so long to release it, why were its conclusions so wishy-washy given the extensive evidence of electoral fraud, and why was the deputy president of the Constitutional Court dragged into a political dispute which could open his office to criticism and undermine confidence in one of our most cherished institutions?
It is a debate in which Parliament needs take the lead and central role, because if ever there was a justification for the separation of powers it lies in the scrutiny of an executive when it has led a country into a foreign war.
In the meantime, for the sake of good neighbourliness, we should set our much- abused troops to work helping Lesotho re- build its capital, if necessary with some of the cash our Ministry of Defence had earmarked for its corvettes – the temptations for gunboat diplomacy clearly being too much for us at the present juncture.
When we are finished we can erect a plaque, dedicated: “To the people of Lesotho, from their neighbours in South Africa, with thanks for the lesson they taught us and apologies for the pain it cost them.”
Law, order and children
`May you be born in interesting times,” goes the Chinese curse. An equally perceptive curse would be: “May you be born of famous parents.” The psychological mechanism is not clear – it possibly results from distracted parenthood, or the pressures of high expectations – but the syndrome is easy to discover, whether in the troubled childhoods of the Mandela children, the antics of Desmond Tutu’s son, or the cross borne by Margaret Thatcher in the form of her son, Mark.
For that reason we are less than impressed by the lynch-mob hysteria being whipped up around the Fourways High School tuck shop scandal, against a group of pupils including the daughter of Minister of Safety and Security Sydney Mufamadi. Their public humiliation is a heavy punishment for children who seem to have been led astray by adults. The campaign for further sanctions smacks of an attempt to smear the minister by association, a political low-blow of the crudest kind.
This newspaper campaigns ferociously for transparency in the lives of public officials, but we feel uneasy, to say the least, about intrusions into the privacy of their family members, particularly under-age children.