South Africa “the protest capital of the world” - The beginning of the end for the ANC!
As the ANC turns into an aggressive kleptocracy - and confronts an ongoing country wide revolt from poor communities - the politicians have made themselves the enemies of their own people. As one of its members said: “The ANC regards their own people — not the other official political parties — as their true opposition, because they are closer to the pain on the ground.”
The ranting against Boers and ugly women is to take attention away from the multitudes of protesting people whose life is a nightmare under the rainbow-nation mirage. The very convenient return to anti-apartheid songs calling for whites to be shot.. and their harping on ‘struggle songs’ as they were sung in the past, is not a reflection of how attached they are to the struggle, but an attempt to get the people to believe that all they have is remnants of the old order against whom their anger should be vented. In this way, the political elite sidetracks the people from singing about the current dislocation of water and electricity, the ruthless and violent evictions of shack dwellers, the vicious police attack on service delivery protesters, and the kleptomaniac proclivities of the new political and economic elites. They raise race not to confront racism but as a card to render themselves immune from criticism and also to find a slice for themselves in the economic cake. It is a weapon of mass distraction. They want to focus the people on imaginary fights with the Boers while the filthy rich black political and economic elites are involved in equity deals with the stinky rich whites, strolling half-naked with them in exotic beaches and exclusive resorts.The brutal killing of an unarmed protestor, attacked simultaneously by six policemen - viciously beaten with batons and fired on at close range with rubber bullets.
Tatane was a school teacher, a councilor, a husband and father of one child, a rolemodel in his poor community where he was a volunteer teacher helping learners to improve their marks in Science, Math and Afrikaans. He rescued a helpless old man from being sprayed down by a water cannon. He took his shirt off to draw attention away from the old man, telling the police to rather spray him. The cops then attacked him. Anybody with sense will recognise brutal, excessive force by ill-disciplined cops. The ANC Militia, masquerading as the SAPS, are now clearly and assuredly completely out of control.
Shocking images of the police brutality were broadcast to the nation on television yesterday - they showed an unarmed man being viciously beaten and shot to death by a mob of policemen.
Pictures of the attack on the 33-year-old man by at least six policemen simultaneously, during a service delivery protest at Setsoto, in Ficksburg, eastern Free State, were shown on all SABC news bulletins last night.
The visuals of the chilling and sad scene show how the armed policemen cornered Andries Tatane, striking him with their batons and kicking him in an assault that lasted for a few minutes.
Tatane, from Masaleng township, Ficksburg, is seen holding his hand against his chest after the assault. He collapsed and died before an ambulance arrived.
Click on image below to watch SLIDESHOW Ficksburg killing
We are all Andries Tatane - By An Anonymous Reader
South Africa is far from what Tunisia was like pre-revolution (for one it is not governed by a one-party police state), but the parallels of small-town cops beating to death (here‘s video footage from the South African state broadcaster SABC news) a South African Everyman because he was angry with poor or non-existent service delivery (water, electricity, roads, housing) is eerily reminiscent of a certain fruit vendor in southern Tunisia. Again, the differences between South Africa and Tunisia are too many to mention. But if you asked someone in Meqheleng (yes, I did look up the largest township in Ficksburg in the Free State Province) if they are as frustrated as your typical Tunisian circa 2010, I wonder what they would say?
Would the ANC’s proper electoral mandate and liberation credentials outweigh the impression that those in power–Jacob Zuma, Tokyo Sexwale, Sicelo Shiceka, and Siphiwe Nyanda, etcetera–are amassing wealth and governing just like Hosni Mubarak and Ben Ali? I worry that a few years from now they won’t care how legitimate the ruling party’s mandate is: poor service delivery is poor service delivery.
You know at least for now in further Tunisia parallels the people of Ficksburg have ratcheted things up a bit.
That leads me this: Does that 18-year old in Meqheleng know the basic dynamics of what is happening in North Africa or the Middle East? Are vernacular radio and local papers giving the “Arab spring” coverage, at least to the point that that 18-year old realizes how crap Mubarak was and, closer to home, how dismissive the ANC leadership has been to their demands the last 17 years, basically the span of his or her entire lifespan?
Trevor Manuel, former finance minister, said in the aftermath of the Paris riots that Cape Town is treading water. Meanwhile, Moeletsi Mbeki, brother of Thabo, drew a picture for the country following the events in Tunisia.
We shouldn’t be surprised when in the absence of meaningful political representation and mediation, the atrophy of social change, and in a context of socially acceptable and government sanctioned accumulation through nepotism, cronyism, and political-connectedness, the structural violence of South African life finds vivid and widespread expression.
“Service delivery” protests (a misnomer if there ever was one), or what passes as xenophobic, domestic, interpersonal violence, wanton brutality on the part of security apparatus, all these are all symptoms of the greater malaise.
Death in Ficksburg shows how we value life
By : ITUMELENG MAHABANE
A MAN died this week. He died with his arms clutching his chest, trying to stop the blood spilling out of a gaping bullet hole.
His crime? In a country in which nearly 50% of the people live in poverty and where nearly 50% of black people are unemployed — most of them without the prospect of ever finding a job — he died because he wanted a better deal for his community.
In a country in which miscellaneous items worth hundreds of millions of rand are consumed each year by politicians, where people become instant multimillionaires supposedly providing public goods, goods that rarely materialise, this man died because he wanted his government to do its job.
There is no official finding. Early indications are that he was killed, possibly murdered, by the system that is meant to protect him. He was beaten viciously by a group of police officers. Then he was shot. Probably as he was lying on the ground, hurt and defenceless.
By the the middle of this morning, there had not yet been a statement of sympathy, of outrage, of a call for an investigation, from a member of the Cabinet.
A country with three Nobel Peace Prize laureates, a government ruled by a party once described as having the most genteel armed wing in the world, and this is what we have been reduced to?
The public, vicious deaths of citizens at the hands of the people entrusted with protecting our lives seemingly leaves us cold.
In Andries Tatane’s death we have shown, unequivocally, how we value life in a country with a constitution that is supposed to be the most progressive and enviable in the world.
This is not simply about police brutality. This is about national brutality. The police are simply a reflection of the society we are. It begins with the acceptance of the brutality of poverty and economic injustice.
Former President Thabo Mbeki described SA as a country with two economies, a first economy and a second economy.
Between 70% and 80% of South Africans live in that second economy and it is a place of humiliating and incapacitating poverty.
The overwhelming majority of our country survives on a household income of less than R2500 a month, most will spend between R500 and R1500 a month on accommodation because there is a shortage of pro-poor housing stock.
That is ignoring for a moment that even R1000 will simply get you a makeshift room. These households must then feed, clothe and send their children to school.
These poor people must survive in an economy in which pricing is determined by the need to satisfy the earning expectations of first-world citizens and their price-fixing and where their government has failed to provide functioning public infrastructure.
The poverty in which vast numbers of South Africans live can make places such as Alexandra seem like places of privilege.
We have people who have been on housing lists for more than a decade, many of them the supposed recipients of supposed houses built by people who live it up at bling parties, hobnobbing with the political and business elites of the first world.
Meanwhile, provinces are rushing to outlaw shack settlements.
We seek instead to criminalise the poor for being poor.
They must know their place and sit in the dust bowls that apartheid shipped them out to until the rest of us have eaten.
We cannot have them scarring the vistas of our first economy.
The maladministration and poor governance is tolerated, rewarded even.
The unequivocal message from the reaction to the death of Tatane in Ficksburg is that not only do we do not value the lives of our people, the government has a minimal sense of accountability to its citizens. If it does not care about their lives then how can it possibly care about its duty to them?
This is not simply about poor governance and delivery, it is about economic and social justice. There is something repugnant, for instance, about the ease with which we demonise workers in our battle against inflation, when the problem is multifaceted.
In a country of bread-price fixers, officials who steal from children and pensioners, and crass chauvinistic materialists, the ease with which the working class has become the enemy of the country is a reflection of the society we have become
We can comfort ourselves and tell ourselves that we have a democracy and a constitution and that there will be no violent uprisings in this country.
Yet democracy is not a piece of paper. It functions only if people believe they have a real choice, and many do not think they do.
In that context, the combination of extraordinary inequality, material excess, poor political accountability and responsiveness, and debilitating, brutalising corruption will eventually spread the flames engulfing poor, black SA into our comfortable little first world.
We are becoming tribes at war. We need to find our way back to prioritising an inclusive and just society.
• Mahabane is a partner at Brunswick.
Dramatic footage of the whole clip was shown on the e News Channel (Warning - shocking and disturbing) where the man was just verbally challenging the police while they were threatening the crowd with a water cannon telling the protesters to go away. He was unarmed and posed no threat to the police. The man was first attacked by a cop with a batton, then he started fighting back... THEN Sky cut the clip in where you see him fighting the cop. They make it look like he was violent to begin with, leaving out the beginning.
Another Police Beating
Police Beating