Marx, Violent Crime, and South Africa’s Future

An earlier version of this piece was written for Business Day last year. This slightly modified version is published herein to highlight the inherent folly in the reluctance of Mr. Thabo Mbeki's government to address and help resolve the continuing crisis in neighboring Zimbabwe where Mr. Robert Mugabe's mis-governance has steadily run the economy into the dust. Recent reports indicate that the huge flow of economic refugees from Zimbabwe into South Africa is provoking a hostile back-lash from South Africans.

Notwithstanding that he lived and died more than a hundred years ago, and that the former Soviet Union, which represented the first human society that implemented the socio-political ideology that he formulated with his benefactor Frederick Engels, aspects of Karl Marx’s thoughts remain quite relevant even today. One such thought is his prediction that economic systems or modes of production lay foundations for those that succeed them. We must recall that he was most particular about that in his predictions that capitalism would lay the infrastructures in the science and technology realms that socialism would inherit once it dawns under the auspices a workers’ vanguard Party. No where is that prediction most applicable today than in post-apartheid Republic of South Africa. In spite of all of the evils that it represented, as an ideology, apartheid provided its architects, advocates, and supporters with the basis for the unprecedented exploitation and management of African labor in a manner never seen before on the continent in the twentieth century. Like all other modes of production before it, apartheid crumbled at the very time when it couldn’t cope with its inherent contradictions and the crisis they unleashed in South Africa, which rocked and threatened international capital quite tremendously. That was to the degree that compelled the various stakeholders in South Africa and elsewhere to reconsider their quiescent support and collaboration with apartheid. As they say, the rest is history, but today apartheid is no more in South Africa. Only the most cynic who visits South Africa today would ignore to acknowledge that the extensive fixed capital—extensive road network, efficient power and portable water systems, educational, healthcare—and others that were embedded in South Africa under apartheid remain the attraction for the stupendous capital from abroad which fuels South Africa’s continuing economic transformation. These are in spite of the truism that the quality of life of Africans was extensively marginalized by apartheid and all that it represented while apartheid and the state that practiced it lasted.

Around this immediate point revolves the problem that represents the most serious threat to South Africa’s future as a multi-racial and democratic society. That threat is represented by violent crimes. Hardly does a week pass without screaming front-page headlines in all manner of South African newspapers about one violent crime or the other that took place in parts of the country. The more eye-catching are the violent crimes that involve the death of police officers and other security agents. The one of Monday, July 17 last year that claimed the life of 37-year old officer Lesley Mashaba in Kliptown is typical for the reason that it knocks at the heart of economic and politically-driven immigration from within Africa, which is one of the issues that this piece addresses. Officer Mashaba, a fifteen-year veteran of the force in Gautang province was allegedly killed in a shot-out that involved suspects who are Mozambican nationals. He is one of the 51 officers killed in South Africa’s eight provinces, including Gauteng between January 1 and June 30 last year. Gauteng, which was described by the Johannesburg Star as “the deadliest province for police officers to work” claims 23 of the 51 off and on-duty police officers who have lost their lives to violent crime during the period. Gautang province includes Johannesburg, the vibrant commercial nerve centre of the South African sub-region which attracts economic migrants from across the continent.

In Durban during the next week in July last year, delegates to the International Sociological Association, ISA sixteenth World Congress of Sociology who came into town to be hosted by their South African colleagues for their body’s four yearly gathering were literally made ‘prisoners’ in their hotel rooms after five of them fell victim to muggings. The experiences of the delegates to the ISA Congress are hardly isolated by any means.

In the same month of July last year, an official world alert on crime in South Africa was issued by major industrialized West European and North American countries—Australia included—to their nationals who travel to South Africa as tourists and cautioned them that the former is unsafe for holidays. The alert is hardly frivolous. It came on the heels of a survey of clients’ travel insurance claims by Norwich Union, a United Kingdom-based insurance company. Norwich Union’s survey revealed that more than travelers to other countries, travelers to South Africa were the most likely to be victims of a range of crimes that include violent robberies and the loss of luggage and other belongings. Johannesburg’s Berea and Hillbrow inner city enclaves, KwaZulu-Natal’s central Durban, beachfronts, Zululand, and Northern KwaZulu-Natal, the Table Mountain in Cape Town, and virtually all the country’s isolated picnic points and beaches were indicated as likely places where violent and serious crimes reign.

Some analysts and even South African public servants have been quick to simply lay the blame for the problem on apartheid. Some others have preferred to merely spin it away in ways that minimize the dangers that it represents for South Africa’s future as a vibrant economy and new democracy. Such dangers are too real for ANC, the South Africa Communist Party, SACP; the Coalition of South Africa’s Trade Unions, COSATU; and other stakeholders in the current multiracial dispensation not to appreciate them. Violent crimes in South Africa derive from two principal sources; internal and external. On the internal front: Apartheid’s uneven development of South Africa, its peoples and economy is indeed responsible for creating the internal situation in which those South Africans who were left behind in the impoverished homelands and townships from where they can now migrate to the cities and other places without restriction where they embrace crime to survive. The external sources are the surrounding countries in the sub-region and the rest of sub-Sahara Africa where political instability, bad governance and gross mismanagement of all sorts wreck havoc on economies and drive able-bodied individuals out to South Africa where they seek economic refuge, and in most cases succumb to lives of crime.

The current emphasis on law enforcement by South Africa’s policy makers at all levels of government is the equivalent of band aid, which will not stem the trend of violent crimes in the country to any meaningful degree. The bold measures must come by way of a package that must alongside law and immigration enforcement, include on the one hand, initiatives that would extend the dividends of multi-racial democracy to impoverished areas of South Africa, on yet the other hand, others that will help to restore or bring about political stability, good governance, and sound economic management to those African countries that export economic refugees in droves to South Africa.

Urgent steps must be taken to extend the ‘built environment of facilities’—roads, airports, ports, cable networks, railways, pipelines, fibre-optic systems, electricity grids, water and sewage systems, housing, factories, offices, schools, and hospitals, and the like—to the homelands, townships, and other areas in South Africa where apartheid wouldn’t have them. The absence of such ‘built environment’ in the homelands, townships, etc. will sustain the age-old status-quo whereby capital ‘in all its physically mobile forms, continue to actually move over’ them and perpetuate their economic impoverishment, which will in turn perpetuate the flow of uneducated, and jobless individuals to where they must adopt crime to survive. Political stability in Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, etc. will translate to good governance and sound resources management all of which will dove-tail to less number of economic refugees into South Africa. Manageable numbers of internal and external migrants in South Africa is one of the logical solutions to its growing violent crimes rates. In that regard South Africa must step forward to assume its leadership role on the continent without equivocation. There’s no alternative to South Africa’s leaders going beyond the call of duty to compel and convince the leaders of countries that send economic refugees to South Africa to sit up and govern their countries and manage their economies well.

This is where all of the stakeholders in South Africa’s multi-racial democracy must step forward and take the bold initiative to secure their country’s future. Continuing to do otherwise translates to the sort of irresponsibility that Karl Marx once decried as sitting by and waiting for the roast pigeon of science and technology to fall into one’s mouth. It’s a choice that resonates all over most of the rest of Africa, which is at the root of the economic stagnation that prevails on the continent.