I had been about to write a blog on the awkwardness of democracy, on how it throws up winners and losers, and that, sometimes, the losers need to bite the bullet and move on.
In other words, e-tolling in Gauteng, scheduled to begin next week, has been through the democratic process, and those opposed to it have lost. It’s been to Parliament and the Constitutional Court and been endorsed by both. Therefore, if you’re a democrat, you need to pay up. Not necessarily with a smile, but because it would show your support for democracy. E-tolling is now the law of the land and you’re expected to show civil obedience.
That’s certainly the tone adopted recently by the ANC, which is both the ruling party in South Africa and in Gauteng. The fight has been fought, those of you opposed to e-tolling lost – now pay. It’s the democratic way, e-tolling is now law and obeying the laws of the land is not optional.
But it seems that civil obedience is optional when it comes to Cape Town, which is, of course, not ruled by the ANC, but by its bitter rival, the DA.
I’m inferring this from the tacit approval being given by the ANC to Friday’s big march on the Mother City. According to this morning’s Cape Times, as many as 200,000 people, mostly poor, will descend on the city to vent their anger at the DA’s poor service delivery. The newspaper quotes an internal memorandum distributed to the provincial emergency services staff, which says “looting has been encouraged at the planning meetings that have been taking place in the informal settlements.”
The same edition of the newspaper also reports on a statement from 86 prominent Capetonians, pointing out that the democratic process is “currently under severe assault by a group of political activists in the Western Cape. Because they were not chosen by the electorate, who preferred to have a different party ruling the province, they have set in place a campaign to destabilise the Western Cape and make the province ungovernable.” The newspaper says: “The ANC Youth League was singled out a number of times as being responsible for these attacks.”
The Cape Times’ banner headline – justifiable, in my view – is “Assault on democracy.”
And nowhere do we hear or see a peep from either national government or the ANC about theese ongoing attacks in Cape Town, or the threat of Friday’s protest march, with “looting…encouraged.”
This is what I mean when I refer to the ANC’s ‘tacit approval’ for Friday’s event. Which brings me back to e-tolling and Gauteng.
We either have full respect for democracy and its processes in all of South Africa’s provinces, irrespective of who’s in or out of government. Or we don’t. The ANC can’t have it both ways. If obeying the law is optional in Cape Town and the Western Cape, then it has to be optional in Johannesburg and Gauteng, as well.
So until I hear a very clear call for respect for democracy in the Western Cape, and until I see clear action from the ANC in the province to demonstrate their support for the principle of democracy, I shall encourage everyone I meet in Gauteng not to pay their e-tolls and to work as hard as possible to cause the system to collapse.