What if this IS us?

I’m cursed with optimism. But as the smouldering cinders of last week burned themselves to charcoal and our president flanked by his podgy unkempt generals wailed war talk of an insurrection, and social media was overrun with stirring renditions of the national anthem and images of people sweeping the broken shards of debris from a week of shame, I felt short changed.

I cannot allow my optimism to blind me like cataracts to reality.

In a slight elevation from his usual monotone, the president informed us that an unnamed Zuma and a dirty dozen of saboteurs wrought havoc on our nation. In an attack on our democracy, they targeted road arteries, ports, oil refineries, and strategic key-points, but their attempted resurrection had come to naught.

The woke coterie of TV commentators berated us with stories of how what we are witnessing is the poor, destitute, and unvaccinated taking food to which they were entitled given long COVID-19 shutdowns, gross income inequality, and insufficient government support.

My fellow squad of optimists tell us how the country has come together, how people of all races have manned the barricades, protected the malls, how taxi associations have sought out the fugitives, and how, with brooms in hand, by sweeping the destruction of supermarket aisles, we will rebuild South Africa.

Channelling a national therapist, our president assured us that this past week wasn’t us, “This isn’t who we are as a people,” he said. But what happens if he’s wrong? Isn’t it time to take a really good look at ourselves in the mirror and realise that this is exactly “us”, this is exactly who we have become as a nation.

What concerns me isn’t that a kleptocratic former president and his criminal cohort attempted to overthrow a democratically elected government. What doesn’t worry me is that sadly, Pick n Pay and Shoprite Checkers were robbed of bread, milk, and eggs. What concerns me most is the image of long lines of orderly, disciplined luxury and semi luxury vehicles waiting peacefully in line for their chance to loot the Makro distribution centre in KwaZulu-Natal.

These cars and their jubilant occupants weren’t the poor, the hungry, the destitute. These were middle class and upper-middle-class fat cats, willing to steal because order and society had simply broken down.

After the 1994 first democratic elections, while executive director of the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), I employed the services of a private detective to track down the assets of the IEC which had been stolen, looted, and plundered during our first democratic vote.

The detective taught me a valuable lesson. Twenty percent of the population will always steal, he explained, 20% of the population will never steal, but the remaining 60% of people will steal, rob, and loot if they are presented with an opportunity where they are likely to get away with it, when law and order has broken down, and where criminality has become an acceptable norm.

And very sadly, that’s the environment we have created in South Africa. We have watched the Zumas, the Guptas, the Magashules, and most of our last few governments loot the state. Pravin Gordhan, our minister of public enterprise, estimates that R500 billion was stolen from the people of South Africa during the Zuma era.

Analysts believe that corruption has lost the country R1.5 trillion since the advent of democracy. That’s about R50 000 per adult South African stolen by a government which swept to power in order to liberate and transform South Africa.

That’s been the price for each individual South African, stolen from pensions never paid, houses never built, jobs never created, and grants never paid.

When you live in a society with no consequence, when theft is all around you, when those in power are never brought to justice, then the fertile ground is ploughed for anarchy.

Permission is granted to everyone to say, “If he can, why can’t I?”

If the police stand back and watch the looting, swearing helplessly at the criminals, but allowing the chaos to engulf the nation, then you are guaranteed crime with no consequence.

In Rwanda, ordinary citizens turned on their neighbours and became murderers for a month. They weren’t murderers before, and they weren’t murderers afterwards.

Similarly, in Nazi Germany, in places like Lithuania, where most of us herald from, Jews were killed by their neighbours who didn’t kill before and didn’t kill again. But the climate was created in which there was no consequence for the crime, where criminality was the norm, where everyone was given permission to be part of the mob rather than the one to stand against the tide.

In these circumstances, ordinary, law-abiding, tummy-filled South Africans took to the streets to steal R67 000 couches that don’t fit into their homes, to loot 75-inch TVs that can’t fit into their cars, and to line up orderly and peacefully waiting to loot and plunder their local mall and store.

So, Mr President, this wasn’t an aberration, this was “us”. This was the real South Africa that we have created, a country with no consequence, a country that the apartheid apologists warned us about.

It’s time we looked in the mirror and realised that the real South Africa just punched us all directly in the face.

• Howard Sackstein is chairperson of the SA Jewish Report.