Pride will mix with anger on Saturday as the gay and lesbian community stages its annual pink march through Jozi. The march has moved from one of protest at prejudice in the early Nineties to a celebration of freedom after the Constitution outlawed discrimination against sexual orientation.
Must Pride revert to protest? The events of the past month suggest so. Jacob Zuma, the man who wants to be king, has been outed as a homophobe while government has retreated into the bankrupt logic of “separate but equal” legislative treatment for same-sex unions.
Speaking in rural KwaZulu-Natal last weekend, Zuma told his audience that when he was young, gay men “could not stand in front of me”. Facing a rebellion in his ranks, on Thursday Zuma apologised “unreservedly for the pain and anger that my remarks may have caused”.
It is his second unreserved apology: the first came after his rape trial when he revealed Neanderthal attitudes to rape and to HIV infection. That time it might have worked; this time the apology rings hollow. In a frightening echo of Robert Mugabe and Sam Nujoma, Zuma also said gay marriages were ungodly and unAfrican.
The right to be protected from discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation is, famously, established in our Constitution, and with it the right to equality before the law, which must, of course, include marriage.
That Constitution is the signal achievement of our negotiated revolution — a revolution in which Zuma played no small part. Is it possible that he wanted the rest of the country to hear him, and to see in him a champion of the new conservatism?
Equally disturbing is that his remarks find an echo in the mainstream of government. The Constitutional Court has ordered Parliament to make legislative provision for same-sex marriages by the end of the year. This could easily have been achieved by inserting the words “or spouse” into the Marriages Act alongside the gender specific “husband” and “wife”. Instead MPs are considering the Civil Unions Bill, which seeks to carve out a separate legal regime for same-sex partners in the interests of “social cohesion”. This is sexual orientation apartheid.
Why is a government that has stood firm on the death penalty and abortion rights now on the run from religious and cultural conservatives? Is the ANC, mindful of the deep unhappiness within its ranks over its stance on these issues, unwilling to risk a principled stance when divisions run so deep and the stakes are so high?
The Constitution is not to be held to ransom by the brutal politics of the moment. Saturday’s marchers march for all of us.
A thin blue line
The rate of violent contact crime (cop speak for murder, rape, assault, robbery) has come down, or so government trumpeted this week. But what does it mean?
That 18 858 people were murdered between April 2005 and March this year, compared with 18 793 the year before. That 54 926 women reported that they had been raped, 188 fewer than the year before. In other words, it means nothing. We remain brutalised. Terrorised. Besieged. All of us, not just “white whingers” but each and every citizen who feels the edge of a knife pressed menacingly to a throat; a gun thrust to a temple. Each of us who lives with the daily fear and threat, be it in a suburb, a township or on a farm.
Murders, attempted murders and other contact crimes are down — off an appallingly high base — but aggravated robberies, cash heists and hijackings are up. And as the figures are for the period April 2005 to March this year, they take no account of the crime spike since the end of the reporting period, acknowledged by the government in the various emergency crime-busting plans it has announced.
Close inspection of the statistics highlights the many structural flaws in our law-enforcement system. In many serious crime categories there is an alarming downward spiral from already low detection targets to miniscule prosecution rates. A quarter of murders are detected and a fifth reach court; for aggravated robberies the figures are 13% and 10%; for carjackings, 7% and 6%. And detection does not necessarily imply that a case is investigated; the term also refers to dockets closed without investigation.
Add to that the nightmare statistics which show that most murder, rape and assault victims are known to each other and it is clear we are in a logjam.
Safety and Security Minister Charles Nqakula was unable to provide conviction rates at the media conference, but it can be assumed that they confirm the trend. There are good police stations dotted around the country with dedicated officers, but many others which are ineffectual. Many stations continue to lack basic policing infrastructure, including cars and such items as bullet-proof jackets. We do not have enough detectives and senior officers.
Rather than tackle the roots of the crisis government officials seek to minimise it and shift the blame by, for example, reducing reporting on trends to a once-yearly ritual and arguing that many interpersonal crimes are a socio-economic rather than policing issue.
Despite the endless campaign launches, the overriding sense is of an absence of drive and vision at the top; of a failure of both operational and political leadership. Nqakula is more enamoured with peace-making in Burundi than he is with crime-fighting at home; police National Commissioner Jackie Selebi has never fitted easily or well into the blue line.
For all President Thabo Mbeki’s reputation as a technocratic president keen on the detail of governing, this week’s release of crime statistics shows that he and his Cabinet have not yet begun to master the fight against crime.