#Andries Tatane …before it was racism…now just plain indifference.

South Africa’s people should not be dying because of service delivery protests in 2011.

In the same way that Smuts did not struggle to be poor, the poor also did not struggle to remain poor, marginalized, unseen, and uncared for. Only to be invited to come out of their miserable existence every now and then to put their cross behind the political party that has managed to bamboozle them the most with promises that this time everything will be better.

Those of us who have been around long enough will know that community protests are nothing new. The response of the upholders of “law and order” is also nothing new.

Over the last 50 years at least hundreds of people have lost their lives as a result of police action during community protests. But those were during the Apartheid years. We knew we took our lives in our own hands when we embarked on any form of protest action. I remember 1 May 1990 in Tulbagh when we liberated the “Whites Only” camping site. Snipers were deployed along the route and heavily armed riot police were stationed everywhere. All we did was to march peacefully and with permission.

Bottom line is. We were neither surprised neither scared of this show of force because this is what we have become used to after many years of struggle.

After 1994 we promised ourselves and each other that now South Africa would be different. We would be building the “Rainbow Nation“. We would be a shining example to the rest of Africa. We talked Ubuntu. We celebrated the inauguration of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela as the first black President of this New South Africa.

Our hopes were high. Our heads held high. We proudly went beyond the borders of Africa and proclaimed that we will not be another Africa country. Somehow we felt and made everybody to understand that our leaders were better.

More humane.

More caring.

Less arrogant and corrupt.

Living by a higher standard of morality shaped by years of struggle and dedication to the ideals of a free, non-racial, non sexist South Africa.

Today we know that we have misjudged ourselves and our leaders. We know now that we are all human and for some or other reason there is this deeply seated disease that turns elected officials into mini-gods. Untouchable. Uncaring. Indifferent to the cries of pain of the very people who have put them there in the first place.

This is the reason why Andries Tatane is dead today. He was killed as much by  the policemen who brutally assaulted him as by the politicians at all levels of government whom we, the people, have put in those positions in the first place. They have failed us and the Andries Tatanes of South Africa. It should not help the ANC to condemn the actions of the policemen. It is an ANC municipality that did not deliver to the people who entrusted them to deliver basis services such as water.

The ANC has admitted as much:

The Minister for Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, Sicelo Shiceka, speaking to the South African Local Government Association (SALGA) in East London on Wednesday (22 April), admitted that ‘many of our municipalities are in a state of paralysis and dysfunction’. According to the Minister, local government is perceived to be incompetent, disorganised and ‘riddled with corruption and maladministration’. He indicated that, if what they found in North West Province is indicative of the state of municipalities elsewhere in the country, there might be a need to declare a ‘national state of emergency‘ on local government. (at SALGA, East London, 22 April 2010)

Andries Tatane did not have to die. There should not have been any need for people of South Africa to protest against the lack of services in their communities, that in many cases have not changed at all since the dark days of Apartheid. This is especially true of the community in Ficksburg when they still have to fight for access to clean water.

Before, Andries Tatane would have died because of the criminal and systematic neglect of a racist Apartheid government. This week Andries Tatane died because of criminal and systematic indifference on the part of our elected officials.

In other words: plain indifference.

#Libya…we are looking in the wrong place for a solution

Gadaffi is cruel, a monster, a dangerous lunatic, a butcher of thousands of innocent men women and children, eater of the livers of his victims, sex maniac, the devil incarnate. He must go or, preferably bombed out of existence (this according to some of his fiercest opponents.

The popular narrative that we are being spun is: once Gadaffi is gone we can then start rebuilding a modern, prosperous, non sexist, non tribalist and European inspired democracy. This was confirmed as much at the recent Libyan conference held in the UK.

Now the African Union is being instructed to attend the next round of talks in Doha so that a course can be charted forward. In the meantime NATO is acting true to form and manage to very efficiently accidentally kill more and more anti-Gadaffi forces.

Will all of this bring the outcome that the first group of protestors were hoping for when they started their protests in the middle of February?

I always thought not, and the events over the last two weeks have unfortunately confirmed my initial views. My sense was, and still is, that we have been looking in wholy the wrong place for a solution for Libya. The reason for this: we were psyched into simply bundling in Libya with the rest of the events unfolding in the Middle East and North Africa.

in order to understand this we should take a step back in time.

Remember the Taliban and Afghanistan? After September 2011 we were asked, nay, exhorted, almost brainwashed, to forget about the cosy relationships Western governments had with the Taliban regime. This in the face of exhortations by human rights organisations that the West should speak out more forcibly against the blatant human rights abuses that were taking place there.

Or, remember Iraq’s Saddam Hussein? He was effectively the US’ point man against Iran. He committed terrible human rights abuses and was only reigned in when he decided, reportedly on a mistaken reading of the “nod and a wink” he received from his friend Donald, to invade Kuweit. Even after this disastrous adventure he was still allowed to meet out terrible punishment on those who dared to differ from him.

And now we get to Gadaffi. Over the last 42 years he has consolidated his power position and allowed his cohorts to amass enormous wealth. For many years he was publicly shunned but privately wooed by Western governments and businessmen. When he saw the writing on the wall in 2003 he hurriedly sent out his sons and his now defected Foreign Minister (Kourie) to retread his image abroad, offered billions in compensation to the victims of terrorist attacks and threw his oil fields open to the likes of Eni and BP. He was received and visited by almost every Western leader from Tony Blair to Barack Obama.

For anybody who have been alive and taking in the news since 2001 the connections between these three regimes are pretty clear.

In the case of the first two sufficient time has now passed to enable us to draw preliminary conclusions about the military campaigns that unseated the governments and the bloody battles that are still being waged every day. Hundreds of thousands have perished and still there is no hope for a peaceful solution.

I would have thought that everybody would have learned four lessons:

1. Even if the leader or leadership level of a country is taken out by a combination of internal and external military force, there is no guarantee that hostilities will cease.
2. There is no guarantee that the “liberated” people will not turn on their “liberators”.
3. There is no guarantee that the new “leaders” will not, over the medium to long-term, trend to the same despotic behaviour as the one who has been replaced because they discover that it is the only way in which a highly fractious country can be controlled.
4. Many more people have been killed in those countries than the people who would probably been killed by leaving the “natural” cycle of oppression in place. I am pretty sure if we were to ask the thousands and thousands of families who have lost loved ones if they would have preferred their freedom or having their loved ones with them, that we would get the obvious answer: a loved one trumps freedom any day.

We now find that the West is doomed to make the same mistakes in Libya (except maybe for putting as many Western boots on the ground as they expect the Arab nations to do that in this case) and we are all being exhorted to fall in line, because we are being shown the false comparison of Rwanda.

In my view this is looking in the wrong place for the Libyan solution.

I think the road to a solution lies somewhere amongst the following options:

1. Continue to exert relentless pressure on Gadaffi and his cohorts. Box him in by the No Fly Zone. Dispatch missiles every time that his troops move. Broaden the mandate of Special Forces to systematically take out snipers in Misrata and incapacitate Gadaffi’s ability to exert or project his military powers.
2. Instruct the rebels to immediately curb their ambition to march to Tripoli. They should also drop their demand for NATO to bomb Gadaffi out of power. It will simply not happen and if NATO were to succumb to this demand they will simply have to inflict the sort of bombardment upon Tripoli that will turn the entire Arab street against them. In summary, not a very bright thing to do.

In my view the effect will be that two broad geographical spheres of influence get established. A ceasefire of sorts take hold and the space for more sensible diplomatic and political bargaining can take hold. The guys in the East have the advantage that they control most of the oil and therefore the money, but they should not be allowed to exploit it for military purposes, only to act as a negotiating tool.

Of course the details will be more complicated, but I am convinced it will be a hell of a lot less bloody than the way that we are doing at the moment. It is also less Twitter sexy, but I don’t think the majority of Libyans would mind.

If only people would care enough to listen to me.