It is a pity that Jacob Zuma, Nathi Mthetwa and Bheki Cele talk such blithe rubbish about the threat of attacks on foreign Africans living in South Africa’s townships and informal settlements.
With every bland assurance that warnings of violence are mere rumour-mongering, and that actual attacks are isolated incidents of random criminality, they sound more out of touch with the reality on the ground.
That reality has already driven home more than 40nbsp&000 Zimbabwean migrants, as our reporting this week suggests.
The fact is, however, that they are not as lueless as they sound. The police have dramatically stepped up their presence in potentially flashpoint areas, there is intense intelligence-gathering work underway both in immigrant communities and among those fomenting violence.
There have been a number of community meetings, covertly or overtly backed by the state, aimed at calming the situation and expressing solidarity with foreigners. And the results are evident.
There has not been a conflagration on a major scale. Some Somali shops are reopening, their owners reassured by a visible police presence and, it seems, by regular consultation with law enforcement officials. The army, meanwhile, is prepped for action if necessary.
All of that speaks of a serious and concerted plan to deal with the possibility of substantial violence, not of the xenophobia denialism that we hear from
government officials on public platforms.
There was deep shame and concern across the country and on the commanding heights of government over the May 2008 attacks — and a determination that they not be repeated.
The explanation for this apparent contradiction is pretty simple: the government line is that talking about public violence provokes it; that to warn of a
climate of threat, as the news media have, is to create self-fulfilling prophecies.
Frankly, we’ll tolerate a bit of silly rhetoric from the top if the real work on the ground is succeeding, as it currently seems to be.
The longer-term concern, however, is the persistence of circumstances in which a credible threat of xenophobic violence is able to develop.
The government, struggling for all kinds of good reasons with the scale ofimmigration from the rest of the continent, is not able to articulate a clear
policy on migration.
“Love your African brothers and sisters, but they better watch out when we come raiding for ID documents” is not the clearest possible message.
Even more difficult is rising anger over unemployment, poverty and exclusion from economic and social opportunity.
It is too easy for local shop-owners, for example, to mobilise anger against the foreign traders with whom they struggle to compete, because deep resentment in poor communities can find few credible avenues for democratic expression.
It is readily channelled into bigotry and violence instead.
These are forces that cannot, at base, be contained by any number of armed men, only by social, economic, and political development.
If they don’t want to talk about xenophobia, Zuma, Nthetwa and Cele may want to talk about that.
The minister vanishes
Has anyone seen the Minister of Sport lately?
His name is Reverend Makhenkesi Stofile. He also has a deputy called Gert Oosthuizen. If you have, please let us know — they have disappeared from our radar.
One would’ve thought the World Cup was the perfect opportunity for our Department of Sport, or Sport and Recreation South Africa as it is officially called, to showcase its abilities and achievements.
But, like Benni McCarthy, SRSA was nowhere to be seen.
The last time we heard of the reverend, his deputy and their department was when they told all and sundry why Springbok iron man Tendai “The Beast” Mtawarira shouldn’t be allowed to play for South Africa.
This was a few days before Mtawarira was officially granted South African citizenship. (They had spent thousands of taxpayers’ rands on advertisements in national newspapers denouncing Mtawarira’s selection to the Springbok squad.)
The next time they appeared was when they tried to jump the gun on announcing Caster Semenya’s return to international athletics. A PR disaster followed; the reverend and his sidekick were denied their moment of glory.
Why is the president allowing this important portfolio to be neglected so badly? Various sports codes need close attention to development structures, governance, and performance.
The amounts needed to create powerful national academies along the lines of Australia’s or Canada’s pre-Olympic “own the podium” programme are trivial in comparison with expenditure on the World Cup, but their results could be much more lasting. Now is the perfect
time to be making that case.
But Stofile isn’t. If Stofile can’t make himself heard right now, in the happy calm after the vuvuzelas, he doesn’t deserve to be in the job. South Africans care about sport — and sport helps us to like each other a bit better.
We need a minister who cares too.
When Zuma “reorganises” his team in the few weeks, Stofile should be allowed to maintain his low profile outside of government.