After plunder, lives still matter

IN 2016 Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu delivered the Bantu Biko Memorial Lecture which still rings with truths uttered by this wise man.

In his speech Tutu bemoaned the state of the black person, exasperated that the black person’s life was not where it should be. He postulated that he did not believe Biko’s Black Consciousness finished what it was set out to do.

According to the archbishop, the apartheid past damaged communities. He did not understand why people would trash the streets and break shop windows when registering disdain for authority.

Yet he supported assertiveness, saying black people needed to love themselves so as to be liberated internally.

His words reverberated in my mind as I observed the plunder last week in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, grateful the other seven provinces were able to avert the pillage.

It was also heart-rending to see the looters destroying everything from automatic teller machines to pharmacies. Even more heart rending was that many of the services destroyed are part of uplifting all communities.

Many argued that poverty can lead people to being oblivious about their dignity and self-worth because what comes first to mind is survival.

Some also argued that all those believing in the challenges of black life would understand how the events that unfolded in the first place.

Yet others still pointed out that if we respect black lives, we cannot always let black people dwell in the habitat of victimhood.

Questions have also been posed as to who do we blame for this violent and malevolent ransacking which took us straight to social regression. People need solutions to hunger, joblessness and homelessness.

Many perceived paradoxes in the recent turmoil, stating that black people were undermining the Black Lives Matter agenda; it was also distressing to see many breadwinners whose workplaces were destroyed.

Then in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, countless people could not access health facilities amid the pandemonium. Never have we witnessed events that bamboozled everyone like this, leaving gaping wounds inside.

Really poignant was that the mayhem may have delivered bread for a week, but soon the old order prevailed.

Amid this anarchy, I cringed to hear that even township entrepreneurs who sell live chickens and sheep by the roadside in Vosloorus had their wares confiscated by marauding crowds.

One does not want to even contemplate the alleged racism said to have flared up in some parts of Durban where Africans were at loggerheads with Indians. We hope these incidents do not dim the rainbow that we so cherish; our rainbow that is supposed to build the national consciousness.

We also wonder whether poverty is the reason. No thuggery can ever be justified though, especially the grim pictures we witnessed.

Some are saying we cannot be surprised by the events because society has created the monster that is gobbling the society. The monster has been there wolfing the poor communities slowly.

The persistent screams against corruption and the wails of communities calling for social justice have been alarms of communities lifting their hands impatiently to say they need service. But who listens to people who have nothing?

Frantz Fanon would still blame the middle-class that took over from the oppressors. He portrays how the middle class becomes intellectually lazy in a way that fails nationalistic ideals and other patriotic dreams. The national consciousness was the last thing many looters were thinking about, let alone any form of racial consciousness. And if we need anything after three decades of democracy it is self-identity, self-reliance and a conscientised mind. These do not feed the poor, a sceptic would say. But this is where humanism and self-worth begin.

The horrid events have also unmasked the weaknesses in society and these may be elements that have been brewing slowly. They left many people depressed as they mourned the fragility of our democracy. And I am certain none were prepared for these events that unravelled like a destructive tsunami.

Again, Fanon points out that the elite lack practical links between them and the masses; they are not only lazy, they are cowards, hence decisive moments of struggle will lead to tragic calamities akin to what we witnessed.

Years after Biko, we still have to achieve the humanity we needed to search for. It says much about my allegiance to my country if I can have the audacity to destroy factories and throw stones at the police. Or maybe the lazy intellectuals at the helm rarely show the people equanimity and nationhood as they aggrandise their own granaries, looking at the people whose dry mouths are perennially agape. And maybe looting is also not only executed by the indigent.

In the past three years the Zondo Commission has revealed the forms of looting done by the affluent. These are the hands that have been fiddling with the taxpayer’s kitty and the most outrageous, we have seen in the middle of Covid-19, is how millions were embezzled by people who transformed community projects into getrich-quick schemes. Countless people have ransacked projects, leaving the potential beneficiaries with nothing.

Maybe now the masses have learnt the law of the jungle, that you eat or be eaten. But I do not think that society should look at the greed of looters, for they show no example.

Going back to Tutu’s lecture, we should start with respecting one another. We cannot respect property or the land if we do not exalt one another. Damaged by the past, we still struggle to build a sense of dignity, belonging and veneration for life.

Few of us really know what the future holds because many people who seized goods from the shops will still be starving tomorrow. The giant refrigerators, the big television sets will all be empty if we do not have self-reliance and ways to mend the country by both the haves and the have nots. Greed from upper echelons of government will continue setting wrong examples as the country rots.

We need to celebrate the provinces that did not start the looting for the price to pay is high. We now know that some looters were driven by greed, others by criminality and others by the sad reality of hunger.

Still we need to always be conscious of who we are, even in these adverse times. Something happened that was really despicable.

Let us listen to the echoes of the archbishop. We need to try again building, not just destroyed shops, but to rejuvenate the mind among all citizens, black and white.