“South African voters, like fanatical club football supporters, continue to return the ruling party to power. Voters seem to have become numb to criminality,” says an acting judge who clearly has had enough of unlawfulness and the government.
In an earlier judgment in the Gauteng High Court, Pretoria, Acting Judge Vuyani Ngalwana commented at length about how people, including politicians, no longer cared about toeing the line.
He also did not spare President Cyril Ramaphosa, as he referred to the “Farmgate scandal”.
The judge’s comments followed an application by 26 or so homeless people who made the pavement next to the famous Pretoria landmark, the Burgerspark, their home.
The City of Tshwane demolished their shacks, and the homeless urgently turned to court, asking that either they be allowed to live on the pavement or be moved to suitable accommodation.
Judge Ngalwana said the court could not grant an order that facilitated continued violation of municipal by-laws. He ordered that they had to move to alternative housing, which the City had offered them.
At the beginning of his judgment, he voiced his dissatisfaction with the state of the country.
“South Africa has become a veritable cesspool of lawlessness … People generally seem to do as they please, without any fear of consequence, including arrest and successful prosecution. Media reports have, in recent times, carried stories about people stealing electrical cables right on the doorstep of a police station.
“The police, who are supposed to enforce the law, have themselves been at the receiving end of criminality. Others have themselves been implicated in the very criminality the tide of which they are supposed to stem. An entire National Police Commissioner was convicted of corruption.”
The judge said legislators, who were supposed to pass laws under which all were governed, had been accused of living high on the hog on salaries that hardly justified their lifestyle.
He referred to Ramaphosa exposing himself to a situation involving a conflict between his official responsibilities and his private business”.
“The president, under oath at a judicial commission of inquiry, characterised the ruling party as ‘accused number one when it comes to corruption’. Yet South African voters, like fanatical club football supporters, continue to return the ruling party to power. Voters seem to have become numb to criminality.
“This is not a political statement. It is an observation on the cosy relationship that South Africans seem to have with criminality. The state of the nation seems to be one of endemic lawlessness,” he said.
The judge said there was another dimension to the national state of lawlessness: the soft words South Africans tended to use to describe certain crimes, depending on the identity and station in life of the people who committed them.
“In his 1946 essay on Politics and the English Language, George Orwell succeeded in surgically peeling off the veneer of prosaic respectability from what passes for ‘modern’ English to expose the ugly lies ignominiously hidden beneath.
“Mourning the perversion of the English language – ostensibly in the name of modernism but, in truth, with a view to obfuscating and deceiving – he observed that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes. That observation finds an austere ring of truth about it in the South African language of choice in describing certain crimes.”
He said the great enemy of clear language was insincerity. For example, when senior company executives “cook the books”, the media had described it as “accounting irregularities” instead of calling it what it was: a crime, and those who perpetrated it, criminals.
It is little wonder, then, Judge Ngalwana said, that people should feel justified in pitching a tent or similar structure on a pavement next to a public park, call it a “home”, and rush to court on an urgent basis to complain when the municipality removed their “homes”.
He observed that the homeless in the case even demanded that they be compensated for violating municipal by-laws, even after they had, by their own version, unlawfully reconstructed their makeshift homes.
“Can they be faulted for believing that if common criminals, legislators, the executive, and law enforcement officers are seen getting away with far more serious criminality, that they too will get away with their lawlessness and criminality?”
The judge said South Africa was supposed to be a constitutional democracy where everyone was supposed to enjoy equal protection and benefit of the law, and no one was supposed to suffer arbitrary deprivation of property.
“But in recent times, it has become clear to all who care to observe, through an objective lens untainted by factional tint, that South Africa’s fabled Constitution delivers much constitutionalism only in text and not in the lived experiences of millions of those who live here.”
The case exposed that “soft underbelly spectacularly”.
“It is not the first such case to do so and, dispiritingly, it is not the last. Elected public representatives at all three levels of government, who are supposed to bring the lofty promise of the text of the Constitution to life for the benefit of everyone, have become numb to ephemeral public outrage and judicial rebuke.”
Judge Ngalwana said that regrettably, the urgent court was not a platform that was suited to developing the law or diving deeper into the root problem hidden beneath the facts that served before it.
The judge said the City earmarked a shelter at 2 Struben Street but the homeless people had said the shelter was “not conducive to individuals to reside in”.
“But then how is a sidewalk, with no ablution facilities, more conducive to human habitation?”
He ordered that for now, the people had to move to that accommodation.
Pretoria News