The Mob in South Africa

May 21st, 2008 Posted in Violence

Trouble has followed the Zimbabwe migrants to South Africa. In the last week there have been attacks on Zimbabweans and assorted other strangers by local gangs of roughnecks parading as warriors in and around Johannesburg but otherwise not clearly identified. The government and the press and the people expressing opinions through the Internet seem uniformly against these actions. The police are working but behind the curve. It feels like a possible moment of crisis.

Yesterday a venerable agency called the South African Institute of Race Relations issued a report on the context of the violence that is critical of the government. This agency has been around for some eighty years and supports social research, a data bank, a program to get deserving youngsters into higher education, and it issues editorial type reports and statements. I can’t vouch for their politics and purpose but their conclusions are highlighted in the local J’burg press. My impression is that the Institutes’s people see themselves as pragmatists as against the committed ideologues of the government. In any case the report offerers a theory about the violence.

The regime from the African National Congress has been in office for over ten years–long enough to frustrate the high expectations the people had at the start. The advances in the well being of the people has not materialized in large part because of the wrong- headed, the incompetent, and the corrupt in the governing cadre. A free floating frustration. The bullies are ready.

The failure is in five parts.

(1) Crime. Crime and violence have become an accepted way of life and the executive, judiciary and the police are either unwilling or unable to contain it. The attack on foreigners feels like the same old neighborhood violence focused in another direction. A placid group, neighborhood or society is less likely to fall to any kind of violence. The goons are able.

(2) Border Control. The mass influx of refugees, run-aways, the adventurers and the ambitious are in large part illegal but the police who have replaced the soldiers formerly in charge are not sufficiently trained and are without the numbers and organization needed for the job. The large numbers from Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Mozambique that seem to agitate the local toughs should not really be in South Africa. In addition the diplomacy of the politicos who everyone expects should have some leverage over the Zimbabwe leadership’s behavior seems to support the policies of Mugabe and company that are driving the masses of people out in the first place. The victims have indirectly been put in their vulnerable position by the South African government.

(3) Unemployment. An inflation in unemployment seems to reach upward of 50% of the potential work force. No matter the successes in mining and manufacturing this is an economy in catastrophic free fall. Everyone’s on the dole and so has the energy to attack the other and is so demoralized and agitated to be willing to hit out at the other as well–the mob is willing.

(4) The educational institution is about as bad as it was in the pre-liberation days. The kids are undereducated and not prepared for the high tech jobs that are and could be available. Education reform is making no progress. A large uneducated, unqualified and unemployed population is in place and constantly replicated.

(5) Corruption. The governing cadres at all levels are on the take. They are egoistic and self-serving and would seem unable to seriously entertain the idea that they might be agents working altruistically for the people. This reality trumps all. No matter how sensible and remedial the reform plan the corrupt worker will not carry it out. The governing process will contain layers of gimmicks and short-falls and other mischief.

Hindsight is easy and furthermore these same issues also occur in other jurisdictions–Mexico has corruption, the USA can’t get its public education act together and can’t control the border. Crime is its own country. And how about unemployment in the rust belt? So South Africa is not alone.

Failure is measured against success. The critique indirectly says there is a right way. All you have to do is find it. The difficulty of doing the right thing in the right way and actually getting it done, it seems to me, is staggering. In Washington DC we have a brilliant young and courageous educator-administrator working all out with the support of the mayor, and she is having trouble getting dead wood teachers out of the classrooms (without a dedicated, energetic, active teacher forget about it.) This is just starters.

Remember they are in trouble because it is so comfortable for a significant part of the system to essentially do wrong. To run the cure will kill the old social order and drive out a load of its current denizens. To get the cure process in place there’s a good chance that the current leadership and associates and supports will have to be dumped. At the least all senior (and at whatever other level) incompetents have to leave, get out of the way. The cure is not through or for them. The change has to start with the people who do not want it and who work, if that term can be applied to them, or drag against it.

Remember that at the start of the Great Depression in USA Hoover’s ideology (and maybe even his self-interest) would not allow him to act with any energy, but intellectually and emotionally Roosevelt was ready and did act in a useful direction. That is the paradigm.

Blow the whistle. Start the process.

Note.

The habit of violence among the aggressors and the vulnerability of the target group carries a lot of explanatory weight. Some of the stories from South Africa also suggest an aggressor leadership cadre coordinating and goading the mob onward. It is still an open question: whether there are button pushers or not. It could be one triggering incident setting the pattern that others imitate. And no cadre needed.

Since yesterday when I started working on this post the situation in Johannesburg seems to have calmed considerably. Terrific!