OVER the years the South African definition of long weekend has expanded. Traditionally, it involved a Monday or Friday public holiday. But nowadays only a rare Wednesday holiday does not create a long weekend. President Cyril Ramaphosa himself referred to the period of 18‒21 March as a holiday as the Tuesday is Sharpeville Day (or Human Rights Day as the government named it to deflect attention from the PAC). All of which made Monday 20 March a shrewd choice by the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFFs) and its allies for a call for a national shutdown. Many people would be absent from work in any case. Some sort of success was guaranteed.
More of the EFFs in a future article, but this much needs to be said. They are ostensibly South Africa’s third largest political party, but a ten-year history suggests they are no more than a fascist movement (one of several). They lack oompah bands, but Benito Mussolini would feel comfortably at home with Julius Malema and Floyd Shivambu, though il Duce had a better tailor. The EFFs latest stunt was to disrupt, as usual, the president’s state of the nation address (SONA) last month and having been shown the door, took a detour and attempted to storm the presidential platform at Cape Town City Hall. This is not politics; but political theatricality.
Some while ago the EFFs (an unfortunate abbreviation that lends itself to creative headline writing – use your imagination) announced a total national shutdown. This ambitiously included every part of South African life including international airports. Their demands were ostensibly Ramaphosa’s resignation and an end to electricity blackouts. This may sound fanciful, but is in any case irrelevant: this is grandstanding, not politics and every EFF move is sheer provocation, fanning the flames of discontent. Writing recently, Gareth van Onselen suggested that the EFFs are looking for the spark that will ignite a South African version of the Arab Spring. There has already been a dress rehearsal but the EFFs were largely absent from the July 2021 regional insurrection that was essentially internal to the ANC. This protest was joined by the expected EFF allies, Land First, the Pan Africanist Congress (what is left of it), the South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) and more specifically NUMSA, plus the joke of South African politics, Carl Niehaus’s ARETA. Totally inexplicable was Bantu Holomisa’s endorsement.
In July 2021 it took the government four days to mobilise the defence force whose presence soon brought the insurrection to an end. This time the army was put on standby well before the threatened action and Ramaphosa at his emollient best reassured the people of South Africa of their safety. One intriguing development was that the taxi associations came out against the shutdown and operated normally. Since many taxis are arsenals on wheels that may have been decisive.
Schools were already closed and clearly many people decided to stay at home and listen to the news. We live in a suburb off the beaten track and out of town, but for several days in July 2021 our house and garden were full of smoke (we could see a black pall above the burning petrol station at Mkondeni) and hear gunshots as the police fired rubber bullets and teargas rounds (and reputedly birdshot and live ammunition) at looters. Two dozen people died at Makro next to the Msunduzi River.
People were understandably nervous about some form of repetition. And the EFFs know which buttons to press. All it takes is a few pamphlets. Our small chemist’s shop, admittedly located in an area of student digs, received a letter by hand demanding closure, consulted its security company, and inevitably decided to shut down for the day. Who can blame them? But there’s a word for this and it’s intimidation. So, the main pre-shutdown preoccupation about the potential for violence, and relief when the day passed off relatively peacefully, obscured broader issues that have been lost to public debate.
One common definition of the nation state is that it has a monopoly of the use of coercion: whether violence as in maintaining law and order; or in restricting liberties as during a natural disaster or medical emergency. No institution other than government has that power or legal right over citizens. Thus, the call, backed by threat, for a national shutdown was per se unconstitutional, illegal and criminal. But millions of South Africans did cower in the face of a small bunch of fascists. Think of the thin end of a very broad wedge; think of Nazi Germany, for instance.
It is high irony that the day after the shutdown call South Africa’s contrived human rights day (the rest of the world believes it’s on 10 December) was celebrated. But many of the country’s citizens had distanced themselves from their rights. Given the four-day weekend syndrome it is difficult to say whether or not the shutdown was a success; probably not. This time the police and army did a competent job, not least by confiscating a reported 24 000 old tyres.
None of the Arab Spring uprisings enhanced democracy. Tunisia where they started is today a particularly nasty dictatorship. And this is ultimately what the EFFs are after. Led by whisky-swilling, violence-inclined looters of people’s banks (VBS) their use of the word freedom is mendacious. Their office bearers have military titles: Julius Malema is ‘commander-in-chief’ and its student wing is called a ‘command’. He frequently talks about ‘mobilisation’ and six months ago stated that EFFs should ‘never be scared to kill.’ His approving definition of a revolutionary is a ‘cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.’ There’s not much equivocation there.
It’s axiomatic that rights are never won unconditionally; they have to be fought for and constantly maintained. Monday 20 March 2023 had a positive outcome in one sense: it was far from a national shutdown and saw only sporadic acts of violent protest typical of South Africa for the past twenty years. But too many people did succumb to threat and intimidation for the health of democracy. This was a first since 1994, a challenge whose importance is largely being ignored. It bodes ill for the future.