The culture of impunity

The distressing attacks on African expatriates in many parts of South Africa can be explained partly with reference to poor service delivery and competition for scarce resources.

While we call the attacks “xenophobic”, the fundamental causes certainly relate to political and economical concerns, not simply bigotry—though the targets of what amounts to ethnic cleansing speaks of a deplorable socio-cultural chauvinism. It may be more than coincidental that these attacks came at a time of spiralling food prices.

It is one thing, however, to explain the frustrations of those who acted with such inhumanity; quite another to exculpate their actions. These mobs did not represent their community; and many who suffer daily hardships in informal settlements and townships did not join in the orgy of violence.

Another significant reason for the criminal attacks on expatriates and families of certain ethnic groups is evident: the culture of impunity which has woven itself into the total fabric of South African society — a sense that one can do as one wishes because the threat of consequences for one’s action is diminished.

Commuters witness this sense of impunity every day when minibus taxis violate traffic conventions, and other drivers follow suit because the taxi drivers are seen to be “getting away with it”. Or on commuter trains where codes of social conduct are routinely abandoned.

The culture of impunity finds expression in crime, when even rapists fancy the odds of not getting caught for their crime, or their victims even reporting it (statistics suggest that just one in a hundred rapes in South Africa leads to a conviction). Burglaries are reported to the police, if at all, not with a view to apprehend the perpetrator, but to satisfy the bureaucratic requirements of insurance claims (and sometimes insurance claims are fraudulent, because that is believed, falsely, to be a victimless crime). The culture of impunity reaches such depths that criminals are even murdering police personnel.

Businesses also act with impunity: Manufacturers collude in price-fixing, banks apply exploitative charges, incompetence in the boardroom is rewarded with payments of obscene bonuses (paid for by the consumer and underpaid employees); complaints about inadequate service are met with indifference. The consumer’s institutionalised powerlessness and government’s impotence feeds this business sense of impunity.

Many South African politicians — often seen unduly flaunting their status by disrupting urban traffic — have bought into that mindset, trading honesty and accountability for venal self-aggrandisement. The parliamentary machinations surrounding the Travelgate scandal, for example, serve as a potent symbol of impunity in action. (We need not even allude the avarice connected to the arms deal to support that point.)

Those who wish to deny ANC president Jacob Zuma his day in court to defend charges of corruption encourage the culture of impunity when they threaten to upset the judicial processes, be it by mass action or by the emasculation of those state agencies pursuing the legal course against Mr Zuma (and other individuals with friends in high places).

The slippery slope of South Africa’s impunity starts with the motorist who throws a cigarette butt out of his window, and ends with the anarchy of past weeks.

South Africa’s ethical regeneration — the healing of its self-inflicted wounds by crime or ethnic cleansing — is tied to the defeat of our culture of impunity.

To accomplish this, all who transgress must be held accountable for their actions: the ethnic cleanser, the corrupt politician, the burglar and the rapist, the exploitative capitalist and the destructive protester, the menacing taxi driver and the road-raged motorist, and even the casual litterer.