One does have to sympathise with Jacob Zuma when he complains of being made to feel like a hounded activist of the apartheid days, the way the various warring branches of the State Gendarmerie go about things when fixing to throw the book at a private citizen these days.
Okay, he is feeling the heat in a particularly intense way down there outside the jailhouse on the banana-strewn streets of downtown Durban. But he is not the only democratic, peace loving, loyally ruling-party-voting civilian to feel that the days of the jackboot are back with us.
In many parts of South Africa these days the so-called Metro policeman, and woman, has become a highly visible, deeply feared and mightily loathed symbol of the state’s resuscitated paramilitary apparatus. After a sluggish post-Freedom Day start, when they still wore relatively modest, well-ironed khakis and highly polished brown shoes, and were equipped with not much more than rubber truncheons and hopelessly outdated manual speed traps, the traffic cops have rapidly been transformed into a high-tech SWAT army, complete with hand grenades, stun guns, and seeming powers of summary execution under certain circumstances.
You think I am joking? In an early edition of the Johannesburg Star last Monday, there appeared a brief report (just two short columns, suggesting it was no big deal) of an off-duty police inspector in the town of Harrismith who pulled out his on-duty service revolver and shot dead a cheeky motorist who had had the nerve to tell him to do like the rest of us and park his car in the correct manner, between clearly marked white lines, in that sleepy, nowheresville dorp in the Free State.
The cop (whose name was withheld to protect the feelings of his family and colleagues) later drove to the local police station and handed in his gun, asking for further instructions, having abandoned his bleeding victim dead in the car park (I believe that’s called ‘leaving the scene of an accident” in legal jargon, and is indeed illegal when done, knowingly or unknowingly, by you and me). Needless to say, the national press is yet to follow up on this extraordinary incident in any meaningful way.
But back to fear and loathing. Simply getting into the privacy of your own car and driving out of your own front gate for business or pleasure nowadays has become a mockery of the letter and spirit of the Freedom Charter: ‘There shall be free love, jobs, education and housing.”
All of the above guarantees are wiped out of your mind the minute you hit the street. All you can think of is whether you will be having supper in your own home or in Cell Number 13 at Hillbrow Police Station — the one with the overflowing pit latrine in the middle of the floor. The reason is that there is bound to be a nest of well-placed Metro Cop hornets in their yellow paramilitary jackets, their emancipated buttocks tucked arrogantly into thick, nigger-brown, imported, Chinese-manufactured cotton pants, waiting for you to fall into their trap just around the corner.
When I say ‘trap”, it’s no longer like the good old days of being caught for merely speeding. Back then we’d say, ‘It’s a fair cop, guv,” and all of that, as the geezer shows you hard electronic evidence that you’ve been doing 63km in a 60km zone, and you come to some gentle-man’s agreement that leaves you about R20 short in the household budget before he or she waves you on your way with a caution. Nowadays the geezer, whatever its gender (and who can tell with young people anyway these days?) has amassed the evidence before you have even hove into view, and just can’t wait to punch in a few numbers on the cellphone to come up with a long list of misdemeanours that you’ve already been convicted of, only you didn’t know it.
‘I’m going to have to arrest you,” she, he or it sighs uninterestedly, looking back into the street for more unsuspecting passing trade. ‘Okanye?”
That’s the gap you’re looking for. ‘Okanye?” means ‘Or what?” and is usually the cue for you to suggest that ‘we can make a plan”. After all, we’re all Boers these days.
Only nowadays, the ‘Okanye?” clause has been summarily expunged by the neo-conservative, play-it-by-the-book, buttoned down, virtually self-appointed über-führers of this self-same gendarmerie to such an extent that the innocent bribe is no longer taken as valid currency by the ordinary, post-apartheid PC Plod on the street.
For some weeks we wondered at this sinister change in the status quo, until it leaked out that station commanders had been given instructions to offer each and every traffic cop bonus incentives for coming up with serious quotas of proven offences. In other words, the cop on the beat was being bribed to stop taking bribes. Amazed motorists, dressed for a normal day at the golf course, were astonished to find themselves bumping into each other in chains in the charge office, having to call up friends, relatives and even estranged spouses to come and bail them out.
There has been no end of screams of outrage, all falling on deaf ears, asking why the fuzz are spending so much time and money on arresting people like me for parking ‘within 5m of the intersection” on some long forgotten occasion in an unknown suburb several months before, while murder, rape and mayhem stalk the land unabated. And as I said, much of the said murder, rape and mayhem can be laid squarely at the door of the cops themselves in any case.
One waits, though hardly with bated breath, to hear what will happen to the outraged cop who shot dead that poor fellow in Harrismith for daring to tell him where and how to park his motor vehicle. The prognosis looks increasingly grim for the civilian population — even for those of us who have finally gotten round to paying our road licences for the coming year.