The fundamental premise of the modern state is that the government must retain a monopoly on violence, and that once this monopoly is ceded the disintegration of the fabric that holds society together is inevitable. The breakdown of the criminal justice system in South Africa has brought with it an increasing tendency for people to take the law into their own hands.
There is an apparent resurgence of vigilante activity in some of the country’s poorest, most crime-ravaged areas. The brutality of some of this activity is rarely appreciated outside the areas where it flourishes. This was why the footage of a kangaroo court in Cape Town recently captured by Special Assignment made such extraordinary viewing. Television viewers were stunned by footage of a young girl beating with a sjambok five men who allegedly raped her. She then handed over to two men, who flogged the suspects with brutal force. The suspected rapists were naked and bound together, writhing and howling in agony.
Elsewhere in this newspaper, one of our reporters spent some time with a rapidly growing vigilante group in the Northern Province, which habitually flogs suspected criminals. Members of the group occasionally end up in court, either on charges of assault or of murder when they apply their sjamboks with excessive zeal. But apart from these exceptional instances, the group is allowed to flourish.
In both instances, it is the tacit acceptance of this street justice on the part of the authorities that is as disturbing as the nature of the punishment they mete out. The failure of the police to do anything about it can be attributed either to an awareness of their own shortcomings, or to the fact that people’s justice – however repellant – does appear to work. The anecdotal evidence in the Northern Province is that vigilante activity results in a decline in crime rates, for which the police are first in line to take the credit.
And while South Africa’s poor pay R100 a year for the protection of sjambok-wielding thugs, the rich are also contributing to an erosion of the state’s monopoly on violence, replacing the squad cars that once patrolled the empty streets at night with private security vans, the Executive Outcomes of the suburbs.
On one level, one can almost understand this response. The men sjamboking on behalf of kangaroo courts, the private security guards shooting in terror at anyone resembling a suspect, and the members of the public who supported the policemen suspended for viciously assaulting suspects before BBC cameras have all been pushed to breaking point by the failure of the criminal justice system to deliver.
The government has to execute its most important duty, namely the creation of a secure society. The longer it takes to turn the corner in the fight against criminals, the more the behaviour of South Africans on the street will render the cornerstone of our system of justice, the beautifully framed 1994 Constitution, irrelevant.
Cyril’s faux pas
The Mail & Guardian has long been an admirer of Cyril Ramaphosa, particularly for his role in the domestic side of the anti-apartheid struggle in which he contributed so much to the liberation of this country. We believe that his experience then fitted him far better for the leadership of this country than others who are currently considered candidates for the succession.
We were, therefore, taken aback by his attitude towards the issue of editorial independence as evidenced by his row with the editor of the Financial Mail, Peter Bruce. Ramaphosa has “torn a strip off” the editor in public in the pages of the magazine – over which he exercises ultimate control as chair of Times Media Limited – for endorsing the United Democratic Movement in the forthcoming election.
Ramaphosa says the endorsement was poorly conceived, badly argued, maybe the work of a maverick and defied practice all around the world by giving Bruce’s own views primacy.
While it is true that in many parts of the world rich men who are anxious to enjoy the fruits of their money buy newspapers in the belief that this makes their voice more powerful than when exercised over the dinner table, or in board meetings, it is by no means a desirable style of editorial control.
There are other, much better traditions, which we at the M&G boast proud benefit. The Scott Trust in Britain has extended the principles governing the independence of The Guardian, by which a new editor, when assuming control, is instructed to run the newspaper on the same lines and in the same spirit as “heretofore”.
The tradition of radical integrity and independence that is the distinguishing characteristic of The Guardian today has flowed from the admirable acceptance that the views and the direction of that newspaper are thereafter entirely at the disposal of the editor. Any attacks on the independence of our own editor have been very firmly put down by representatives of the Scott Trust.
The effect of Ramaphosa’s intervention at the Financial Mail is to place his fine stable of publications -including Business Day and the Sunday Times – in an extremely invidious position and has, in effect, weakened the integrity of those publications. We would appeal to Ramaphosa to respect the principle of editorial independence by adopting a regimen such as that in which the M&G currently rejoices.