In a move that will revolutionise SA’s justice system and bring considerable relief to criminals everywhere, human settlements minister Mmamoloko Kubayi on Monday argued that if you stab someone in the head and grab their wallet, you can’t be prosecuted for attempted murder or armed robbery because it was your fingers, rather than you, committing the crime.
It was also entirely the sort of thing you’d expect from the person who thought the best way to keep the country’s tourism industry alive during Covid-19 was to exclude white-owned businesses from government bailouts. If you’re like me, you understand the significance of April 27. In your quieter moments, you wonder where you might be now if the apartheid regime had decided to fight it out. You remember the energising fragility of 1994. You reflect on how little you knew about anything.
What is common cause, however, is that the eventual inheritors of that process — a generation of politicians made arrogant and indifferent by job security and immense wealth — have smeared their crude, limited selves all over its monument. One obvious intervention would seem to be voter education, a process whereby young people are taught about the ideals and values of democracy in the abstract, and gently reassured that democracy doesn’t automatically involve wholesale looting or sheltered employment for people like Kubayi.On Monday, the Department of Extremely Basic Education tweeted about a new campaign of voter education, organised with the Electoral Commission of SA and aimed, one assumes, at schoolchildren.