African Arguments

Top Menu

  • About Us
    • Our philosophy
  • Write for us
  • Contact us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter
  • RSS feed
  • Donate
  • Fellowship

Main Menu

  • Home
  • Country
    • Central
      • Cameroon
      • Central African Republic
      • Chad
      • Congo-Brazzaville
      • Congo-Kinshasa
      • Equatorial Guinea
      • Gabon
    • East
      • Burundi
      • Comoros
      • Dijbouti
      • Eritrea
      • Ethiopia
      • Kenya
      • Rwanda
      • Seychelles
      • Somalia
      • Somaliland
      • South Sudan
      • Sudan
      • Tanzania
      • Uganda
      • Red Sea
    • North
      • Algeria
      • Egypt
      • Libya
      • Morocco
      • Tunisia
      • Western Sahara
    • Southern
      • Angola
      • Botswana
      • eSwatini
      • Lesotho
      • Madagascar
      • Malawi
      • Mauritius
      • Mozambique
      • Namibia
      • South Africa
      • Zambia
      • Zimbabwe
    • West
      • Benin
      • Burkina Faso
      • Cape Verde
      • Côte d’Ivoire
      • The Gambia
      • Ghana
      • Guinea
      • Guinea Bissau
      • Liberia
      • Mali
      • Mauritania
      • Niger
      • Nigeria
      • São Tomé and Príncipe
      • Senegal
      • Sierra Leone
      • Togo
  • Politics
    • Elections Map
  • Economy
  • Society
    • Climate crisis
  • Culture
  • Specials
    • From the fellows
    • Radical Activism in Africa
    • On Food Security & COVID19
    • #EndSARS
    • Covid-19
    • Travelling While African
    • From the wit-hole countries…
    • Living in Translation
    • Red Sea
    • Beautiful Game
  • Podcast
    • Into Africa Podcast
    • Africa Science Focus Podcast
    • Think African Podcast
  • Debating Ideas
  • About Us
    • Our philosophy
  • Write for us
  • Contact us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter
  • RSS feed
  • Donate
  • Fellowship

logo

African Arguments

  • Home
  • Country
    • Central
      • Cameroon
      • Central African Republic
      • Chad
      • Congo-Brazzaville
      • Congo-Kinshasa
      • Equatorial Guinea
      • Gabon
    • East
      • Burundi
      • Comoros
      • Dijbouti
      • Eritrea
      • Ethiopia
      • Kenya
      • Rwanda
      • Seychelles
      • Somalia
      • Somaliland
      • South Sudan
      • Sudan
      • Tanzania
      • Uganda
      • Red Sea
    • North
      • Algeria
      • Egypt
      • Libya
      • Morocco
      • Tunisia
      • Western Sahara
    • Southern
      • Angola
      • Botswana
      • eSwatini
      • Lesotho
      • Madagascar
      • Malawi
      • Mauritius
      • Mozambique
      • Namibia
      • South Africa
      • Zambia
      • Zimbabwe
    • West
      • Benin
      • Burkina Faso
      • Cape Verde
      • Côte d’Ivoire
      • The Gambia
      • Ghana
      • Guinea
      • Guinea Bissau
      • Liberia
      • Mali
      • Mauritania
      • Niger
      • Nigeria
      • São Tomé and Príncipe
      • Senegal
      • Sierra Leone
      • Togo
  • Politics
    • Elections Map
  • Economy
  • Society
    • Climate crisis
  • Culture
  • Specials
    • From the fellows
    • Radical Activism in Africa
    • On Food Security & COVID19
    • #EndSARS
    • Covid-19
    • Travelling While African
    • From the wit-hole countries…
    • Living in Translation
    • Red Sea
    • Beautiful Game
  • Podcast
    • Into Africa Podcast
    • Africa Science Focus Podcast
    • Think African Podcast
  • Debating Ideas
Politics
Home›African Arguments›Politics›Beyond Pistorius: The Politics of South African Justice – By Nicholas Rush Smith

Beyond Pistorius: The Politics of South African Justice – By Nicholas Rush Smith

By Uncategorised
September 12, 2014
2459
0

NickRushSmithFrom New York to New South Wales people have waited with bated breath to find out if Oscar Pistorius would be found guilty of murdering his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, in South Africa’s version of the OJ Simpson trial. As commentators analyzed every evidentiary turn, the trial revealed the paranoid world in which many wealthy white South Africans live. From the assignment of a highly regarded prosecutor and judge to the case, it also showed that the South African state is willing to expend incredible resources to bring a high profile suspect to justice.

Yet even as the Pistorius trial has dominated international headlines about South Africa, two lesser known public hearings – the Khayelitsha and Marikana Commissions of Inquiry – reveal more about the challenges with crime and policing average South Africans face. They are also more consequential. Together they show that who has access to the country’s basic institutions of the rule of law is decided as much by party politics as the rights of citizenship.

The Khayelitsha Commission demonstrates this clearly. Presided over by a former Constitutional Court judge and head of the National Prosecuting Authority, the Khayelitsha Commission investigated police inefficiency in the Cape Town suburb of the same name. It was created after dozens of vigilante killings in the area made headlines in 2011 and 2012. Vigilante violence is remarkably common in South Africa, where the police estimate that almost 5 percent of the country’s murders result from vigilantism. Nevertheless, even against this violent background, the Khayelitsha murders were particularly gruesome, often involving the practice of “˜necklacing’ whereby a crowd places a petrol filled tire around the neck of the alleged criminals before setting it alight.

Typically such murders result in little fanfare, perhaps a newspaper article and the possible arrest of perpetrators. But the scale and speed of these murders caught the attention of local NGOs who filed a formal complaint with the provincial government, claiming that abysmal policing was responsible for the grisly murders. The groups argued the police were so lackluster that their relations with the local community had fallen apart, making residents feel they had no choice but to take the law into their own hands. The NGOs demanded an official inquiry.

Troublingly, the Commission only began work after stiff resistance from the African National Congress-led (ANC) government, which has responsibility for the police. Indeed, the provincial government, ruled by the ANC’s chief rival, the Democratic Alliance (DA), had to go to the Constitutional Court to get a ruling allowing the Commission to go ahead. No doubt the DA saw the Commission as an opportunity to expose the underperformance of its electoral foe, a fact suggested by its refusal to include the police services for which it had responsibility in the Commission’s remit. In other words, politics has shadowed the Commission from its outset and, worryingly, for Khayelitsha residents the battle between the two parties suggests that fair access to everyday policing may be governed by electoral whims.

If the Khayelitsha Commission reveals the politics of quotidian policing, the Marikana Commission has exposed the politics of policing at its highest levels. Even though it has drawn little international attention, the Marikana Commission of Inquiry has dominated headlines in South Africa for nearly two years. The Commission is investigating forty-four killings over several days in August 2012 amidst a mining strike, including the deaths of thirty-four miners gunned down by police. Police officials have maintained the killings were committed in self-defense, while representatives for the miners have argued that massacre was, at best, caused by police incompetence and, at worst, cold-blooded murder.

The latter accusations have been fueled by revelations that Cyril Ramaphosa, a senior figure in the ANC and a board member of the mining company at the heart of the strike, contacted government officials to demand “concomitant action“ against the miners for violence committed during the strike. The emails also refer to the strikers as “dastardly criminals,” a phrase that suggests the criminalization of working class politics by corporate-aligned state leaders.

While this criminalization of working class politics by elites suggests a dim future for South Africans seeking better wages, it also shows party politics overshadow equitable access to justice. In particular, the Commission has exposed the ways in which the police have become embroiled in political faction fights. The ANC is a classic “˜big tent’ party whose cohesiveness is fading over time. And as this cohesiveness has started to wane and its dispensing of patronage has increased, the police have been increasingly used by political elites to counter rivals. The same appears to be true at Marikana where the supremacy of an ANC aligned union, the National Union of Mineworkers, was being challenged by an upstart challenger with whom the strikers had aligned, the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union. At this intersection of union, party and police politics, the massacre happened.

Accusations about institutional impropriety always offer a chance for political aspirants to make electoral hay. The same is true here. One of the lawyers for the miners, Dali Mpofu, has built on the notoriety he has garnered at the Commission for being a vanguard of the left to take a lead role in setting up the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), a rival party to the ANC. Regardless of the fact that some of his fellow EFF standard bearers have been accused of being just as rapacious as the ANC’s elites, the EFF won 25 seats in South Africa’s most recent elections, to become the third largest party in the legislature.

So how can average South Africans improve their access to equitable policing? Counterintuitively, the fact that policing is so political offers opportunities. In particular, the two Commissions show the role committed community organizations can have in exposing substandard policing and the politicians responsible for it. This is no small thing. Indeed, such exposure is a testament to the underlying strength of South Africa’s democratic institutions. States sometimes underperform, fail, or act abusively. The test of a robust democracy is whether citizens are able to challenge and correct such failures when they do. In that regard, the two Commissions offer hope for more effective policing in the future precisely because they are so wrapped up in party politics. Although South Africa’s citizens may not have equal access to fair policing, the fact that all South Africans do have equal access to voting booths and to the streets creates powerful opportunities to pressure their political leaders to provide equal justice for all. To realize justice, they need to take advantage of both.

Nicholas Rush Smith is Assistant Professor of Political Science, City University of New York – City College.

Previous Article

Boko Haram’s Gwoza ‘caliphate’ demonstrates group’s increasing ...

Next Article

China and South Sudan: economic engagement continues ...

Uncategorised

0 comments

  1. Peter Higgins 13 September, 2014 at 03:16

    “No doubt the DA saw the Commission as an opportunity to expose the underperformance of its electoral foe… In other words, politics has shadowed the Commission from its outset ”

    Anyone who claims to know the mind of another, and then draws inference from that, is not worth reading. An assistant professor of Political Science should know better.

Leave a reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

  • Politics

    Mali: one year on… could they see the coup coming? – Andrew Lebovich

  • Politics

    Africa, the U.S., China and the Economic Crisis

  • Politics

    Westgate attack puts Al Shabaab top of the global jihadist premier league

Subscribe to our newsletter

Click here to subscribe to our free weekly newsletter and never miss a thing!

  • 81.7K+
    Followers

Find us on Facebook

Interactive Elections Map

Keep up to date with all the African elections.

Recent Posts

  • The unaccountability of Liberia’s polluting miners
  • Africa Elections 2023: All the upcoming votes
  • “Poking the Leopard’s Anus”: Legal Spectacle and Queer Feminist Politics
  • Introducing Parselelo and a new climate focus
  • The ‘Hustler’ Fund: Kenya’s Approach to National Transformation

Editor’s Picks

CountryEditor's PicksPolitics

Colonialists didn’t fail to root out Africa’s tribal politics. They created it.

In the West, rulers used notions of race to subjugate black people. In Africa, they used ethnicity.  Standing in line at a Nairobi polling station to cast my ballot in ...
  • Nigeria: The cautionary tale of the fateful 2020 strike that never was

    By Immaculata Abba
    February 22, 2022
  • In Madagascar, extreme weather has contributed to myriad crises such as famine. Credit: Rod Waddington.

    The forgotten, cascading crisis in Madagascar

    By Manoa Faliarivola, Marc Lanteigne & Velomahanina Razakamaharavo
    January 18, 2022
  • Uganda's military is engaged in Operation Shujaa in DR Congo. Credit: Credit: Rick Scavetta, U.S. Army Africa.

    “Total Success”? The real goals of Uganda’s Operation Shujaa in DRC

    By Kristof Titeca
    June 20, 2022
  • Aderonke Ige at COP26 in Glasgow.

    We need a people-centred COP26. Instead, we have an elite marketplace

    By Aderonke Ige
    November 9, 2021

Brought to you by


Creative Commons

Creative Commons Licence
Articles on African Arguments are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
  • Cookies
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions
  • en English
    am Amharicar Arabicny Chichewazh-CN Chinese (Simplified)en Englishfr Frenchde Germanha Hausait Italianpt Portuguesest Sesothosn Shonaes Spanishsw Swahilixh Xhosayo Yorubazu Zulu
© Copyright African Arguments 2020
By continuing to browse this site, you agree to our use of cookies.
en English
am Amharicar Arabicny Chichewazh-CN Chinese (Simplified)en Englishfr Frenchde Germanha Hausait Italianpt Portuguesest Sesothosn Shonaes Spanishsw Swahilixh Xhosayo Yorubazu Zulu