Even when the threat of chaos of war and disorder was there for everyone to see, the intelligence, Police Minister Bheki Cele and the country’s president had their blinders on.

Perhaps, these horrors are telling us that we have little or no functioning police service with an intelligence division that works to improve public safety.

South Africa is a country riddled with some of the highest crime statistics in the world, and one would assume that an effective intelligence division that worked to improve public safety should be one of our top priorities.

Yet, in the last decade the SA Police Service (SAPS) has fallen victim to budget cuts and capture with truly little crime-fighting and intelligence work being done.

The SAPS budget has suffered a steady decline, despite South Africa’s corruption-busting agencies warning that such cuts would reverse their gains.

In 2021, Finance Minister Tito Mboweni slashed the police’s budget by R11.8 billion to R96.3 billion to help fund bailouts like the floundering SAA. Look at us now.

The oldest and simplest justification for a government in a democratic society is to protect and safeguard the lives of its citizens.

That is where the public interest lies. It is essential to the preservation of democracy, and it is the duty of the court to do all it can to respect and uphold that principle.

However, we cannot solely blame budget cuts for the current catastrophe. What is clear is that we have a failing state that lacks a clear overall plan to improve policing.

The deterioration and problems in South African policing have been ongoing for years, with little evidence of a clear plan to address them. The government’s National Development Plan 2030, approved in 2012, identified possible reasons for the lack of professionalism in the national police.

As a country infused with violence and susceptible to violent protest, we knew what was coming and that it was preventable, despite all the red warnings, the threats of chaos of war and disorder, but it now appears we were ill-prepared for this kind of situation.

Last year the country was in an identical situation wherein looting, destruction of property and violence was the order of the day – a year later we are still unprepared. How long must law-abiding citizens tolerate this? Why is our government always reactive? They wait until there’s a crisis.

The idea of government as a protector requires: taxes to fund, train and equip a police force and not cut their budget; reviewing the current systems of recruiting, training, promoting, disciplining and equipping police officers – all of which generally seem to be failing.

This can only be achieved with a strong, ethical and highly skilled top management team in place, and not cadre deployment.

The president and his advisers must hang their heads in shame for once again failing to provide law and order and protect citizens from each other.

The horror of this violence is their doing – at least by omission. They are always slow to respond.

Nkosi is a public relations specialist and director of Lilanga Creatives

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One would ask why it is taking so long to deal with these apartheid legacies. Perhaps the answers to these questions can be found within the policies you are pointing at, including the Constitution.

Interestingly, these are the same policies right wing groups like AfriForum are using to contest street name changes and the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s attempt to have the display of the apartheid-era South African flag criminalised. They praise apartheid as a good system and commit other despicable acts aimed at derailing transformation.

Let’s sample the Mala Mala land claim, the largest and the oldest private Big Five game reserve in South Africa. It covers around 130km² or 15 000 hectares. The Tsonga people, who occupied the land before the establishment of the reserve, were forcibly removed from this land during the early 1900s and were dumped in what is now Bushbuckridge.

The Nwandlamhlarhi community successfully claimed the Mala Mala game reserve and the land was restored to them in 2015, at a cost of about R1 billion, a third of the national budget at the time, paid to one white family. How long can we sustain paying such exorbitant prices?

Let’s look at the Tshwane street renaming project. The ANC started it in 2012 in a drive to take down 25 apartheid-era street names and replace them with the names of those who fought for the liberation of the country.

As soon as it started, the project hit a snag with the opposition, including the so-called rational thinkers – the DA and the usual suspects AfriForum – wanting to retain the names of people like Hendrik Verwoerd. As usual, AfriForum approached the high court for a restraining order against transforming these streets by using every law available to them.

Every day when I go to work, the streets I use include Hendrik Verwoerd and John Vorster. Keeping the spirit of Verwoerd alive is an insult to black people, if one considers that he was the chief architect of the apartheid system, particularly the creation of homelands.

Sanity only prevailed four years after legal wrangling started, which cost millions of rands in taxpayers’ money as the city tried its best to justify the decision. Shortly before the local elections in July 2016, the Constitutional Court ruled in favour of the City of Tshwane, allowing it to go ahead and remove the 25 street names and replace them.

As a people and sufferers of colonialism, we cannot continue to harbour, nurse and cherish apartheid legacies like the ownership of land – which is currently in the hands of a few – apartheid-era street names and other social ills that are being perpetuated by those who are hellbent on controlling our future.

A change of strategy is needed and the time is now. Otherwise, we will remain conquered.

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During this period, I was the head of marketing and communication at the Pan South African Language Board (PanSALB) when I wrote my first editorial piece, which was critical of Heritage Day being referred to as “Braai4Heritage”.

Soon thereafter, I received a fiery email from a man named Jan Scannell. This person was not happy with my article because it dismissed his National Braai Day concept. He told me I was ruining his business.  

I was not deterred, however. I also raised my concerns with our useless department of arts and culture. The less said about them the better.

I really had no idea who “Jan Braai” was and why he was dividing our nation so, until the lockdown period when I laid my hands on the book The Stellenbosch Mafia: Inside the Billionaire’s Club by Pieter du Toit.

In it, Du Toit explains that the term “Stellenbosch Mafia” has been part of the South African political and economic lexicon for more than a decade, and, although nobody seriously believes that the grouping exists formally it cannot be denied that there are networks and back channels among some of the Boland-based businessmen.

“The size and reach of the companies either founded or controlled by these businessmen from Stellenbosch are enormous. Between them, they have major direct stakes in no fewer than 16 of the JSE’s top 100 companies. This includes three among the top 10, seven among the top 30 and nine in the prestigious Top 40 Index,” Du Toit writes. All have their roots in, or strong ties with, the second oldest town in South Africa. Not only do many of these companies hold interests in one another, but many members also sit on one another’s boards, he says.

Du Toit continues to say that it is these close relationships that provide “conspiracy theorists with fodder” and that, “Despite the Stellenbosch elite’s denials of the existence of such a grouping of influential capitalists and financiers who have the capability to direct both governments and market forces, like the Randlords of old, suspicions abound and animosity remains.”   

Thanks to this book we know that they gather at restaurants in town to exchange ideas and capital, strike property deals worth millions over chilled glasses of wine and jump on private jets for weekend golfing getaways at private and exclusive estates.

The concentric circles of these networks increasingly include the next generation too, with the progeny of many millionaires (and billionaires) leveraging off their wealthy fathers’ contacts as they build their own empires.

“Some of the offsprings’ projects succeed; others don’t. But there always seems to be enough capital and chutzpah, to tackle the next,” Du Toit says. 

We read that the Millennium Trust funds National Braai Day. The trust which, according to the book, is “a billion rand or more strong” is a foundation run by Michiel le Roux, one of the founders of Capitec, and is managed from Stellenbosch. Le Roux, for those who do not know, is a big DA funder. 

Shockingly, we are told that Jan, who is married to the daughter of a Steinhoff insider, “is paid to organise braais and social media campaigns that usurp Heritage Day in favour of Braai Day”.  

As Rebecca Davis wrote for Daily Maverick: “That may seem trivial, but from another angle it’s a pretty significant flexing of muscle to shape national culture. The so-called Stellenbosch Mafia members may complain about the Bell Pottinger campaign which brought the mafia narrative to the forefront, but initiatives like Braai Day can be seen as a not totally dissimilar form of influence-peddling.”

Scannell’s initiative has enticed the National Heritage Council (NHC) to endorse it and has Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu as its patron. It should come as no surprise that today, the concept is supported by retailers such as Shoprite/Checkers, Pick n Pay and Massmart.  

I am connecting the dots.     

History tells us that using braais for celebration is not new. After all, the National Party seemed to enjoy them after they murdered unarmed black people who were fighting for freedom. Vlakplaas and its founder Dirk Coetzee, in particular, come to mind. 

“As the sun set over the Eastern Transvaal bushveld, two fires were lit, one to burn the bodies to ashes, the other for the security policemen to sit around, drinking and grilling meat,” Jacques Pauw writes in his book Into the Heart of Darkness – Confessions of Apartheid’s Assassins

For some in our country, therefore, braais do not conjure illusions of unity. They are also but one aspect of our diverse cultures and heritage.

In an address marking Heritage Day in 1996, former president Nelson Mandela stated:  “When our first democratically-elected government decided to make Heritage Day one of our national days, we did so because we knew that our rich and varied cultural heritage has a profound power to help build our new nation.”

Our identity is not just based on current events but is derived from and dependent upon the cumulative force of all the things that our various ancestors have done on the cultural front; there are different foods, dances, rituals, dress, literature and music that contribute to our present identity. South Africa has 11 official languages to ensure that identities are not lost. 

As a nation we should not underestimate the role heritage and culture play in our development. 

It is, therefore, sad that our commemoration seems to have lost its true meaning and has become synonymous with partying, drunkenness, violence or commercialism. As a nation that has a capacity for profound and abstract thinking, clearly we are not demonstrating this ability because we have allowed ourselves to be used by individuals who are cashing in on our most valued asset, our heritage.

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