About 10 000 people marched through Durban's streets on Thursday denouncing the xenophobic attacks that have plagued the city in recent weeks. Picture: Sibonelo Ngcobo About 10 000 people marched through Durban's streets on Thursday denouncing the xenophobic attacks that have plagued the city in recent weeks. Picture: Sibonelo Ngcobo
South Africa’s poor are the primary victims of all the social and economic ills the privileged classes like to appropriate: crime, unemployment and inequality, structural racism, non-existent public transport, derisory government service, a collapsing education system, energy and other shortages, the lack of political accountability, and predation from venal economic and political elites.
Unlike the chattering classes, however, they have no newspaper columns and social media platforms to vent their frustrations. They have only their scapegoats.
Enter Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini. We should not have expected anything else. Zwelithini’s history as a paid agent of ethnic mobilisation speaks for itself.
We should not be surprised that he should be found at the forefront of the violence in KwaZulu-Natal, fanning the flames of xenophobic hatred with his poisonous words.
What we should be surprised by is the ANC’s deference to this tribalist dinosaur, who is the very antithesis of the values on which the ruling party was founded. It is disgraceful that not a single ANC leader has directly called out Zwelithini for his speech, which has encouraged people in his realm to blame African “foreigners” for their problems.
It is clear that the Equality Act, read together with the constitution, makes Zwelithini guilty of hate speech. There is no point pussyfooting around it when scores are stoned, shot, battered, stabbed and burned to death on our streets.
Independent Media deplores the orgy of violence in KwaZulu-Natal and elsewhere, and condemns those who perpetrate it. But we condemn most of all the supposed “leaders” who deliberately create an environment where the wanton slaughter of human beings is an acceptable, even required solution to deep-seated social problems.
If the ANC is interested in taking its rightful place as a defender of our constitutional values, and reclaim its own credibility, it should be at the forefront of the condemnation of Zwelithini. Better still, it should lead efforts to hold him to account for his words.
The ANC’s signature should be on both the Human Rights Commission complaint, and a criminal complaint for hate speech and incitement in terms of the Equality Act.