The events that followed the incarceration of Jacob Zuma are continuing to raise more questions than answers as the governing centre tries to have a relationship with the truth or otherwise behind the causes. The emerging consensus seems to be about finding a mast upon which those events can be pinned, and by extension a body of persons to stick the blame to. What we as South Africans may not be interrogating is the extent to which the governing party has capacity to muster the hard power of the state to rain in on the criminality that characterised the events.
The African National Congress has a definite history of relying on soft power to advance its objectives. Since its inception in 1912 the ANC has been a organisation that is reliant on its persuasive prowess to conduct the struggle. It has declared itself, on many occasions, as a non-violent organisation. Deputations to those in power defined its many epochs.
In conditions of extreme pressure and frustration, the ANC would rather emerge with a definition of the problem, how to go about solving it, and at best rendering whomever or whatever is a problem a moral burden to society. Its entire leadership is known more for their diplomatic and statesmanship, even those that are pariah, did it with finesse and benevolence.
The very declaration of the armed struggle, and formation of Mkhonto we Sizwe, was merely to exert pressure, if not extorting a settlement out of the apartheid state. MK was an army we knew existed, but never engaged in any formal war with its enemy. It was a 'hit and hide' affair, with euphemisms that indicated its strategic posture towards, and about, war. The very decision to create it as a structure 'outside' the Constitutional structures of the ANC also indicated that its role and purpose in the struggle was not as central.
Military insurrection was an option whose exercise elicited the most debates in the ANC NEC than any strategic posture. This made the ANC to develop in its struggle arsenal more soft power weapons than the traditional hard power options we have seen in Zimbabwe and Angola. The enemy to the ANC was a system and not its institutions, and if institutions were targeted it was because of them being proxies of the system. This means the ANC might have fought for the institutions hoping to repurpose them to execute a 'national democratic revolution' in order to 'establish a national democratic society'.
The packaging of Apartheid as a crime against humanity, the elevation of the Mandela name and brand into global icon, the positioning of the transition to democracy as a 'miracle', and the many rituals that preoccupied the ANC NEC for decades, has made the ANC one of the most soft power intensive organisation in the world, potentially only second to missionary societies. This was so overplayed that we accepted labels such as rainbow nation to characterise ourselves. No wonder the 'cleaning' campaign is foregrounded over the systemic issues behind the looting.
The tendency therefore to rely on headlining problems of society instead of deploying state resources would later define its approach to the management of the state. In choosing, or losing an ideational battle to, a liberal democratic constitutional dispensation, the ANC defined the South African state into a path the makes the individual more sovereign that the State itself. The sovereignty of the State becomes a factor in so far as it it juxtaposed against others, but as a construct of hard power within its borders it has to navigate inside a maze of rights and laws definitive to how it can impose its will on those it governs.
The 'commander-in-chief' of the armed forces can issue commands that last for a period up to the time a convened parliament can approve continuity, otherwise the maze of law that rule would be called to action. This was displayed through a progressively declining defence budget, which can only mean the slow response of the army to the KZN and Gauteng situations might have been more of an institutional capacity to respond than a will to. The attrition rate of soldiers, and the pornographic inability of the army to absorb youth attracts the questions of 'does an army exist', 'if it does what it its age profile', 'how it it resourced', and so on. This situation might be obtaining in the Police Service and the general management of national security.
Without expanding this opinion into an analysis of the national security situation following the KZN and Gauteng situations, it is very disingenuous for a Minister of Policing to claim that he has received no intelligence report, when his department convenes NaTJoint. It is an open secret that at NaTJoint all state security managing institutions input on all intelligence material to the continued stability and security of our democracy. In fact, as a intelligence led crime fighting policing department, it relies on intelligence gathered patterns to make operational decisions, this goes further into cross border and in-custody crime.
Triangulating this into the soft power burden on the governing party to somehow fail in establishing a strong state, you would also find the race relations related fear of a strong state disguised as an insurance for minority rights. A strong state is in facile terms defined as one that has a bureaucracy, a strong army, a resolute policing arm, and a sophisticated intelligence gathering capacity interspersed into its national interest defence systems. This we do not have under the ANC, if we do, it is as strong as its visible weakness.
The discourse therefore on how we characterise the KZN and Gauteng situations cannot be treated as a battle on how to headline it in the national psyche. This will amount to making Cabinet agenda items into a list of tabloid-fit headlines. The question is, is there a national security report that defines this as an insurrection, and if so what would emerge out of that insurrection as treasonous.
If there is no report to that effect, we are treading into a dangerous territory of putting the police and other branches of the national security management matrix to find insurrection where it might not be existing. However, if the police treatment of this situation as the crime and violence it is, though triggers by a riot attracting event of arresting Jacob Zuma, patterns in the investigation would point to an insurrection, if there was one. The current characterisation has now removed all hypotheses that might have been established by security forces, and an investigation to justify insurrection might be underway. This approach has historical precedents of inviting all dubious methods of interrogation to extort the answer, including labelling those considered a burden to the stability of an otherwise insecure political elite.
With a strong, well co-ordinated, and national interest driven strong state, the KZN and Gauteng situation should have been predicted as the judges were mauling over the judgement. The hypothesis of those dealing with policing operations should have come to a scenario close to what happened, otherwise heads must roll. The Mandela-Mbeki Lesotho gimmick that the President tried by being absent from the land, has backfired, and should not be spin doctored into carelessly considered characterisations that might put us on a precipice. Signs and/or conditions of a sophisticated dictatorship of the cognitive and financially resourced elite are already there, and the mere fact that we have a newly appointed Head of Defence who still needs to consolidate himself, is a manipulatable context for nefarious politics to make our democracy a security led one.
The Minister of Defence in trying to explain why it might be an insurrection, reminded me of a sweating Minister of Police trying to explain how a swimming pool is a fire protection feature. As the cycle begins, the downward spiral continues.
🤷🏽♂️A ndzo ti vulavulela
🤷🏽♂️Be ngisho nje
Comments
Post a Comment