You can’t build a stable society on foundations of injustice

Brett Herron

Among the promises most political parties have in common this election season is to employ more police.

With the abnormal level of crime in the country, the idea of more police on the beat resonates with voters. It’s why both the ANC and DA have established illegal policing units where they govern, in Gauteng and the Western Cape.

But the negligible impact of these so-called Crime Wardens and Leap Officers is laid bare in the consistently shocking quarterly crime statistics.

The truth is that, short of radically curbing people’s constitutional rights by implementing a police state – and all that goes with it, such as precautionary detentions and curfews – deploying extra police is not a magic potion to reduce crime.

South Africa has recent experience of travelling the authoritarian road.

Though the apartheid state criminalised anti-apartheid activities, detained thousands of activists without trial, torturing and in extreme cases, murdering them, all the policing powers in the world were unable to stop the momentum for justice.

South Africa today would undoubtedly benefit from better trained police, which should translate into stronger cases for prosecutors and higher conviction rates. But if the country is to seriously arrest the crime rate, it needs to focus on the causes.

We need to look at the rock from which the democratic state was hewn, and the unstable foundations on which it is built.

We need to understand the social, environmental and economic conditions that produce men (it’s mainly men) without common human values; men with such low self-esteem that they feel it is their right to humiliate and assault women and girls.

It seems incomprehensible that 30 years into our democracy we have yet to treat the symbol of apartheid division in the Western Cape, the culture of gangsterism on the Cape Flats, to name but one example.

Is the appropriate question: Why have the police not stopped the gangsters? Or is it: What are we doing wrong that our children are still signing up for gangs?

If the latter, we must address the mountain of business left unfinished to address the suffering that history bequeathed us.

What options are we giving children growing up in communities where crime bosses are regarded as role-models? What alternatives are provided for children to play in the street?

In what way do sports clubs, cultural programmes and NGO’s need support to play a role in normalising or re-balancing communities?

What is the role of educators and the school system in the early detection of anti-social behaviour? When teachers notice children in trouble, what avenues do they have to seek help to fix it?

Should we not be calling for the deployment of thousands of extra social workers, alongside better policing?

You cannot build a stable society, or stable communities, on foundations of injustice.

Those who say that South Africa hasn’t changed since the advent of democracy 30 years ago are talking rubbish.

We were a racist authoritarian state and are now a constitutional democracy with a Bill of Rights. Whatever your level of loathing for the ruling party’s record, you can’t deny the millions of homes, water, electricity, sewerage connections...

But what hasn’t changed is that millions of citizens, the overwhelming majority people of colour, are jobless and penniless, or barely eking out a living – pretty much as they were under apartheid. To them it doesn’t feel like they’ve yet had the chance to taste the fruit of freedom.

Many live in townships that were designed as places for workers to rest when not at work for white industry, with minimal infrastructure or thought for residents’ humanity, pleasure or developmental needs.

Because the need for extra housing in urban areas is so great, the democratic state at all its levels has focused much of its energy on building new subsidised homes – with little left over to develop existing communities.

The result is that the conditions in which many working class people live today are similar to the conditions their parents and grandparents lived in. In fact, in many cases they are worse due to overcrowding and consequently overwhelmed water, sewerage and road systems.

Then there’s the next level down, chaotic and under-serviced informal settlements...

The levels of poverty and inequality in the country are so high, the economy so marooned, and the conditions for millions of citizens so dire, that many have lost all sense of the hope and common purpose with which South Africa’s democratic voyage began.

The extent of crime is a symptom of all that, but it’s the root of the illness that needs treating.

South Africa needs to have a hard discussion about the way it spends its tax income. That portion of the fiscus that goes towards developing sustainable communities needs radically increased expenditure.

As long as the environments in our communities don’t offer pathways of hope for our children and youth, including outlets for the safe expressions of their creativity and joy, and appropriate social interventions when necessary, we are doomed to continue living surrounded by crime.

The hoary argument that the quality of life of taxpayers who live in well-maintained suburbs must be prioritised is rubbish because it is these people who have most to lose from an unstable society. The image of politicians commanding legions of uniformed police, with shiny weapons to shoot the criminals, is sexy in the context of an election campaign.

Voters, sick of crime, are less and less likely to be fooled.

* Herron is Good Party secretary-general and MP

Cape Times