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WHO are the ‘they’ I keep hearing about? “They should be left without a clinic after burning it down”; “They should be made to do the rebuilding themselves”; “They should find other ways of bringing their problems to the attention of government”.
A couple of years ago, my domestic helper arrived late for work and rather upset. There were no trains, she told me, and she’d had to take a taxi for the last part of her route.
The reason, we discovered, was that the previous Friday evening, people had finally lost their marbles over poor service, rioted and burnt a few train coaches at the major station. There would be no service until the damage was repaired.
So I chipped in some money to cover the extra taxi costs that month – something that not all employers were doing, I was told. And the next month. At three months, I phoned the rail service and asked someone in customer services or some equally poorly named department what exactly was going on.
She said that repairs were still under way. “But for how long?” I asked, exasperated. “This is adding to the burden of transport costs for people who can ill afford it. And it makes the trip much longer.”
“Well,” said my interlocutor smugly, “They shouldn’t have burnt the train then.”
“They? They? My employee did not burn anything!”
“How do you know?”
“Because she only uses the train twice a week, and never on a Friday!”
“Well, how do you know she wasn’t there anyway?”
At which I slammed the phone down.
‘They’ is a blank and amorphous mass, a lump of semi-humans without any characteristics.
Turning people into ‘they’ makes it conveniently possible to ignore their humanity, their needs and wishes and hopes that are very much like everyone else’s across the globe. ‘They’ become disposable, pawns on the board, of little or no importance.
‘They’ are all lumped together no matter what – ‘they’ become all the people in and around Rethabiseng near Bronkhorstspruit because ‘they’ burnt down the clinic.
But no, ‘they’ didn’t. Just like the story of the trains, it was not every mother with a sick child or old lady with cardiovascular problems who did the burning. To lump them all together and punish them by refusing to replace infrastructure is to deny totally innocent people services they should enjoy.
But who’s to blame, anyway? Poke around in these unrest situations and find that identifying a monolithic ‘they’ becomes less and less possible the more you unpack the thing.
I talked with a friend, who works right in the heart of what became the scene of violent protest, about the forces driving it. In this instance, there are at least three political interests involved, each (for their own purposes, and sometimes those purposes don’t serve the community) tugging away at different issues which affect the residents.
No less important is a rather creepy network of criminals who sometimes take advantage of the unrest, sometimes drive it, and sometimes, bizarrely, protect people from its effects.
The underlying circumstance is a community of individuals who are fed up with not having access to some simple things, like safe housing, or reliable water supplies.
And as UJ’s Professor Peter Alexander and Trevor Ngwane’s recent research shows, by the time you reach the point where ‘they’ explode in a way that can be used by politicos and criminals, they’ve exhausted all avenues – a term which came up in an argument I had with someone about protest recently.
She compared the difficulties communities encounter in getting service delivery with her six-month battle to get a marriage certificate corrected by Home Affairs. “I have exhausted all avenues,” she said. “Should I start burning facilities down now, like they do?”
I couldn’t help laughing. There is no comparison between an incorrect marriage certificate – even if it does mean that the foreign partner can’t join her husband in South Africa – and no water, which is a life or death situation.
The people who come out on the streets really have done the hard yards beforehand. Petitions, delegations, imbizos and more... as researcher Trevor Ngwane said, by the time they hit the streets, they really should be carrying banners saying “All protocols observed”.
Having “exhausted all avenues”, they then get blamed, not just as protesters, but as an entire community, for what happens when things ratchet up towards violent behaviour. (Just as a matter of interest, the vast majority of protests are peaceful, the UJ researchers point out – but when ‘violence’ does flare, who gets killed? Forty-three protesters died at the hands of the police in the last decade, seven in the first months of this year alone.)
But really, who should bear the blame? It’s the people who take the salaries and perks of office, and then fail to think about how to communicate with communities, fail to listen to their demands and grievances, fail to do the jobs for which we pay them.
Yes, our tax money will be disbursed to replace that clinic – but that clinic likely burned because of the flaws and failures of people we also pay with our tax money. So it’s twice wasted.
How would you handle this in your business? Anyone who caused such an egregious mess would be disciplined and fired. Instead of lambasting those who take to the streets, taxpayers and corporates should be demanding the same treatment for ‘middle management’ in government.
- Fin24
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own.
A couple of years ago, my domestic helper arrived late for work and rather upset. There were no trains, she told me, and she’d had to take a taxi for the last part of her route.
The reason, we discovered, was that the previous Friday evening, people had finally lost their marbles over poor service, rioted and burnt a few train coaches at the major station. There would be no service until the damage was repaired.
So I chipped in some money to cover the extra taxi costs that month – something that not all employers were doing, I was told. And the next month. At three months, I phoned the rail service and asked someone in customer services or some equally poorly named department what exactly was going on.
She said that repairs were still under way. “But for how long?” I asked, exasperated. “This is adding to the burden of transport costs for people who can ill afford it. And it makes the trip much longer.”
“Well,” said my interlocutor smugly, “They shouldn’t have burnt the train then.”
“They? They? My employee did not burn anything!”
“How do you know?”
“Because she only uses the train twice a week, and never on a Friday!”
“Well, how do you know she wasn’t there anyway?”
At which I slammed the phone down.
‘They’ is a blank and amorphous mass, a lump of semi-humans without any characteristics.
Turning people into ‘they’ makes it conveniently possible to ignore their humanity, their needs and wishes and hopes that are very much like everyone else’s across the globe. ‘They’ become disposable, pawns on the board, of little or no importance.
‘They’ are all lumped together no matter what – ‘they’ become all the people in and around Rethabiseng near Bronkhorstspruit because ‘they’ burnt down the clinic.
But no, ‘they’ didn’t. Just like the story of the trains, it was not every mother with a sick child or old lady with cardiovascular problems who did the burning. To lump them all together and punish them by refusing to replace infrastructure is to deny totally innocent people services they should enjoy.
But who’s to blame, anyway? Poke around in these unrest situations and find that identifying a monolithic ‘they’ becomes less and less possible the more you unpack the thing.
I talked with a friend, who works right in the heart of what became the scene of violent protest, about the forces driving it. In this instance, there are at least three political interests involved, each (for their own purposes, and sometimes those purposes don’t serve the community) tugging away at different issues which affect the residents.
No less important is a rather creepy network of criminals who sometimes take advantage of the unrest, sometimes drive it, and sometimes, bizarrely, protect people from its effects.
The underlying circumstance is a community of individuals who are fed up with not having access to some simple things, like safe housing, or reliable water supplies.
And as UJ’s Professor Peter Alexander and Trevor Ngwane’s recent research shows, by the time you reach the point where ‘they’ explode in a way that can be used by politicos and criminals, they’ve exhausted all avenues – a term which came up in an argument I had with someone about protest recently.
She compared the difficulties communities encounter in getting service delivery with her six-month battle to get a marriage certificate corrected by Home Affairs. “I have exhausted all avenues,” she said. “Should I start burning facilities down now, like they do?”
I couldn’t help laughing. There is no comparison between an incorrect marriage certificate – even if it does mean that the foreign partner can’t join her husband in South Africa – and no water, which is a life or death situation.
The people who come out on the streets really have done the hard yards beforehand. Petitions, delegations, imbizos and more... as researcher Trevor Ngwane said, by the time they hit the streets, they really should be carrying banners saying “All protocols observed”.
Having “exhausted all avenues”, they then get blamed, not just as protesters, but as an entire community, for what happens when things ratchet up towards violent behaviour. (Just as a matter of interest, the vast majority of protests are peaceful, the UJ researchers point out – but when ‘violence’ does flare, who gets killed? Forty-three protesters died at the hands of the police in the last decade, seven in the first months of this year alone.)
But really, who should bear the blame? It’s the people who take the salaries and perks of office, and then fail to think about how to communicate with communities, fail to listen to their demands and grievances, fail to do the jobs for which we pay them.
Yes, our tax money will be disbursed to replace that clinic – but that clinic likely burned because of the flaws and failures of people we also pay with our tax money. So it’s twice wasted.
How would you handle this in your business? Anyone who caused such an egregious mess would be disciplined and fired. Instead of lambasting those who take to the streets, taxpayers and corporates should be demanding the same treatment for ‘middle management’ in government.
- Fin24
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own.
