The role of murder as an [inadvertent]/unintended outcome of State policy.

One is no sooner admiring the orchestrative skill with which we slide from a disturbing razz ma tazz election result into the great Zuma alleged rape headline season than one is brutally reminded, in the week that the movie Tsotsi made its play on the theme of redemption, that we are plunged back into the increasingly murky maelstrom of ‘realpolitik’.

Frankly the public excoriation of the young woman accuser in the Zuma alleged rape trial must rank as the most distasteful event of the year so far and reveals all too starkly the inherently feudal nature of our new Afrocentric society. I am increasingly of the opinion that this concept of Ubuntu, or humanness, as my textbook would have it, is merely a carefully camouflaged variation on feudal servitude. Free people do not need to be polite to each other unless they choose to be.

However it is the seemingly random execution of a four year old child that truly shifts the spotlight to a process that has been all to familiar over the past few decades and which seems to have been permitted to slide offstage, as it were.

The strategic murder of people opposing the direction of the State was an all too familiar theme of the old regime. High profile murders of such as those of Steve Biko, Rick Turner, David Webster and a string of others referred to simply as the such and such four or six or whatever, made headlines when they occurred and have rightly been the subject of subsequent post transformation investigation; and were, we now know, part of a wider pattern of murders: that were supposed to have ended with the new order of things.

Nonetheless there have been a rising number of murders over the past few years that also raise questions about the nature of the society that we are in process of becoming.

First off there is the sheer weight of slaughter over the past twelve years. More than a quarter of a million people have died violently since 1994. The alleged civil war in Iraq following the Bush invasion has yet to claim this level of massacre. They sheer fact of the overall difficulties the State has experienced in dealing with violent crime could be interpreted as simply policy-like the silence on Rumbabwe’s slide to a completely previously unexplored form of economic development.In amongst the general chaos it is most statistically probable that high profile people will get taken out in the process.

However there are those covert politically aligned deaths that are seemingly random and yet are not-perhaps-that truly tease the consciousness of those who concern themselves with such things…Before you shout ‘conspiracy theorist’ I am not suggesting conspiracy of the obvious kind but rather the random process typical of something like Chaos theory that amplifies trends and transforms them into movements, and in retrospect converts them into conspiracies whereas they simply manifest certain basic laws, of thermodynamics, as one example for instance.

We have become used to the idea that the province of KwazNat is a place of political assassination over the past two decades and the numbers are possibly in triple figures now. These murders range from the seemingly random shootings of politically associated figures by roadside gunmen, to the wholesale slaughter of entire families in rural hotspots and the direct slaughter of urban figures in their own doorways. There was even an assassination of some floor-crossing politician by an enraged citizen, which most of us applauded notwithstanding the odiousness of the act.

It is rather like the endemic taxi violence as random operatives seek personal advantage through acts of ‘enlightened self-interest’ by bumping off potential rivals before they themselves are bumped off.

The spotlight moved to the Free State more recently when a prominent political figure was gunned down in his driveway. There was an attempt to pin it on his widow but that seems to have fizzled out, as does the investigation**. Another investigation that seems to have run into a dead end was that of the overweight heavily politically connected Johannesburg Mining figure allegedly shot in a random ‘botched’ hijacking. [**We pay more attention to things local in our city and that murder was ‘out of town’ and therefore only of limited appeal so I may have missed the conclusion should there have been one.]

The most recent and certainly one of the more sinister developments is this week’s apparently random and motiveless execution of the four-year-old granddaughter of the Judge President of the quaintly named ‘Transvaal’.

Now this may of course transpire to be no more than an unfortunate coincidence as a gang of unredemptive ‘Tsotsis’ make their violent way through their seemingly normal day: jackrolling, raping, looting and pillaging in the new way for which we are globally notorious. Nonetheless it is hard to avoid the thought that a powerful figure has been brutally reminded of his vulnerability.

In another incident this week a politically connected woman was apparently also found murdered. She was found dying from gunshot wounds in her car, and according to the radio report I overheard appeared to have been yet another botched hijacking. Last weekend three members of the ruling party were shot dead in a political assassination in the old Kwaznat.

One is reminded when such events occur, of Lenin’s post transformation strategy in the now defunct soviet union when he opened the prisons and cut the murderers loose to wreak random and therefore terrifying, paralysing horror on the citizenry. Stalin’s later variation on this was the ‘liquidation’ of opponents or potential contenders for power: the difference being that we are a democracy and all things are equal, and there is a free market in liquidators.

The sheer fact that it proved impossible to find a judge from the new ruling class to supervise the Zuma alleged rape trial with each proposed candidate carefully recusing himself indicates a disturbing level of ‘de facto intimidation’. That the case must now be heard by a member of the former oppressor class who may at best be regarded as one who would discriminate indiscriminately in a court case, plus the violent behaviour of the supporters all point to a re-enflaming of long suppressed political schisms. What is also certain is that within the next decade these leftover jurists from a less than salubrious past will have retired and moved on and have been replaced with persons of a more compliant disposition. These new jurists may well have been pre-conditioned to present verdicts that are politically approved.

When this trend is coupled to proposed legislation aimed at restricting the independence of the judiciary then it is small wonder that the rand is beginning to head off to a less than desirable place, as outsiders begin to clear the decks in preparation for what many are beginning to regard as the ‘Zanufication’* of the body politic. [ZANU is the ruling cadre in Rumbabwe: an emerging failed State in Africa. They have functioned for decades as a corporate entity that has assiduously looted the assets of the country they have plagued for decades. Most of their plans were conceived as being in the ‘people’s interest’ and all have now failed miserably [depending on one’s point of view] Now they are so desperate for more loot that they have decided to slaughter the golden goose in the interests of short term gain. From their perspective this is an extremely sensible policy; because they will soon offload the colonialist associated oppressors from their midst and will aquire new partners who will be content with a 49% share of the remaining bird. Broadly they have now run out of options and this gives all the rest of the stooges the chance to make one last big hit before dinner’s over.]

Back home the ruling party bosses are smugly, and with good cause, counting their wonderful score [from about half of the population]. General incompetence and failure to perform have been reinforced with approval-There is no general incompetence and failure to perform-these are media led fantasies-. the people are happy and content and they are pretty used to waiting.

Nonetheless there is an old Zen koan that states that the moment of one’s greatest triumph is simultaneously the moment of ones greatest failure. It is possible that we have now reached that Zen moment.

Having fooled most of the people most of the time the ruling party now have to start fooling everyone all over again and the cracks are opening up in the superstructure. As they destroy their opposition their internal cracks become more apparent-making it ever more difficult to satisfy a widening glut of trough swillers. Will electricy be their Achilles heel? We want no Achilles heels they called back…down with heels.

Cheers.

Absurd prediction of the moment: Come September everyone who isn’t already in the ruling party crosses the floor leaving behind them a litany of failed opposition leadership. [Assuming such a metaphor is possible].

Final absurd prediction: Mr Zuma’s strategy of plumbing the depths of his accusers sex life may eventually work to his disadvantage. To the extent that it has revealed a pattern of previous rapes, it will allow the judge to compare her emotional responses to those earlier traumas, under cross-examination, with her testimony in regard to her accusation. A high level of congruence between the various states of response would indicate that she is telling the truth.

Cheers
El Bloggo.