Weapons of Freedom?

Weapons of Freedom?

The Jacob Zuma Coup d'état, was ultimately thwarted, some believe, on grounds that:

1. Private security in South Africa, outnumbered the military, (many private people also bare arms).

2. The taxi industry, it seems, also has no taste for state capturing dictatorship.

So what seemed impossible, happened when Zuma stepped down. To be ‘...free from all forms of violence from either public or private sources;’ is something we need to all stand for. Yet, today it seems no more than a useful fiction in the mouths of government officials hell bent on the boiling of all sorts of frogs. ‘Boiling frogs’ for those that don’t know, notoriously the words of President Cyril Ramaphosa in reference to those excluded from the category ‘our people’. This category seems to shrink daily in those it now excludes, Michael Cassidy reminded us.

It is a cruel irony when Bheki Cele implied (beneath rhetorical concern for our people) that South Africans have no right to arms. That is, in the South African bill of rights: ‘Everyone has the right, peacefully and unarmed, to assemble, to demonstrate, to picket and to present petitions’. In Bheki Cele’s view, unarmed is in reference to those - outsiders with ‘stockpiles’ in particular.

Are we to forget the historic - revolutionary commitments, made in the people’s war by the leadership of the ANC? As Anthea Jeffery made explicit in her book, a people’s war was understood as, ‘...all individuals, irrespective of their political affiliation or how far removed from political involvement they might be, are regarded as potential weapons of war (hence the term, people’s war) and hence as expendable in the conflict.’ The violent struggle, it seems, found justification exclusively for the ANC (remember the Shell House massacre for example). Dignity not even to ‘our people’.

So I find it deeply troubling when people, using the USA anti-gun script, argue from the margins... would you have us, ‘strain out a gnat and swallow a camel’. In South Africa death and abuse happen in all sorts of horrific ways. Would you have us outlaw - Car tires, petrol, bread knives, stones & traditional weapons to name a few instruments of death? Something like the second amendment in the USA is absent from the South African constitution precisely because our brutal history renders it redundant...’With our boxes of matches, and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country’. 

I believe, it’s time to take away the ANC gun (the expendable South African voting people), before the state disarms or boils those standing in the way of dictatorship (at this stage dictatorship is almost inevitable).