But now all hell has broken loose, little of it to do with Zuma any more.
How easy is it to start a riot? Very, it seems. Send a WhatsApp message to five, maybe 10 willing participants. Arrange to meet at a mall. Throw a rock, break a window. Shoppers flee in terror. Then go on social media and say come on down, free goodies. And hundreds of people arrive. More windows broken and looting. Then cell phone videos. Then more people.
Who are these people? One wonders. One of the many videos I watched was a nattily-dressed middle-aged man trying to shoe-horn a truly massive flat-screen TV into his upscale car. This was in a mall in Johannesburg. I thought — does this guy care about Zuma? I doubt it. The looters calmly exiting the mall with bulging shopping carts, included portly mamas, smiling jean-wearing 30-somethings, groups of giggling teenagers. They all had the same look on their faces.
Joy. Glee. Getting away with something.
I have no way of knowing what the desperation levels of the looters were. Whether they had been vainly seeking a dignified job for years and had run out of rope and hope. It didn’t look like it on my screen, but then this particular mall was in a nicer part of town. I am sure that in other spots, like Vosloorus, there were those among the looters who were stealing for utility rather than gees.
But here was the common theme. None of these people seemed to give a damn. Not about the jobs that will surely be lost — most of them at the tenuous bottom end of the economic scale — not about the shame of breaking a social and religious no-no, and certainly not about the long-lasting damage that will be wrought on this country’s sense of itself and the rest of the world’s view of it.
And whatever remains of its pride, now in tatters.
Where, we might ask, were the government institutions tasked with safeguarding its citizens? Where were the police? And where were the intelligence services? Surely they were monitoring social media, getting to hotspots either before or within minutes of trouble? Surely they have embedded human assets among cells of discontent, who keep an eye out for this sort of thing? Surely there are fast reaction teams and nimble crowd control squads? These questions are obviously rhetorical.
Like much else under this government’s control, the job that they are required to do does not get done. We are adrift in a sea of non-governance.
And the president? He came on TV and appealed for calm. Threatened the “full might” of whatever. He said nothing. He calmed no one. He had no plan. Other than soldiers in uniform with no training for the job. And so we become just another pitied country with its army on the streets.
Perhaps the most frightening aspect of all lies not in our failing institutions or citizens prepared to steal without shame. It is rather here: there are those in the body politic with large axes to grind; those with vaulting ambitions and plans to attain undeserved wealth and power. People like Ace Magashule and Julius Malema and those close to the now-empty Zuma throne.
To them, this must have been a revelation.
So easy to do this. So easy to stir the pot of violence and theft to position yourself for the next round of power politics. Just send a tweet, a WhatsApp message to 10 or 15 pliable comrades of dubious moral backbone.
Break a store window.
Break a country. DM
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