We are all poorer in tsotsis’ La-La Land

IN CASE you weren’t sure, here is the state of the nation: it is chaos, and thanks to all parties attending the National Assembly for President Jacob Zuma’s state of the nation address last Thursday evening, we now know to the nearest fathom just how entropic it has become.

Chaos, as we know, is that which ensues when someone in authority tries to restore order. An abler mathematician than I needs to explain this fully, but my understanding of systems is that any new factor will exponentially increase its randomness; interference makes things worse. Anyway, it is fear that drives the need to restore order and someone is afraid, as evidenced by last week’s circus in SA’s highest house.

Wikipedia has a fabulous description of events in Parliament, as the “sudden and illegal seizure of a government, usually instigated by a small group of the existing state establishment to depose the established government and replace it with a new ruling body”. It is its definition for a coup d’état.

Technically, by that definition, SA has had its second coup d’état (the first was when former president PW Botha subordinated the government to the military establishment), but somehow it doesn’t quite feel like a putsch.

Where is the armed force, for instance? Well, in Parliament of course, throwing out a bunch of rowdy MPs, but such is the sophistication of our own brand of usurper that armed persuasion is rarely needed. Instead, patronage as an instrument of force is far more effective. That explains how the tsotsis came to be in charge.

And the tanks at broadcast house? No longer needed, frankly. All you need to control perception is a jamming device in Parliament to block the wrong kind of image to adulterate the ratings agencies’ screens. That explains how Tsotsi-TV focused on the high-up madams while the white-shirts battled red onesies among the venerated leather below.

It also explains that, however stridently the liberal bourgeoisie protests, it is an ineffectual bleating generally thought to represent resentful white people who hanker for the lost days of apartheid. The tsotsis know which media to control and when.

So why aren’t we surprised? That is because putsch day was not last Thursday, or any other one day. Authority is being stolen by stealth, slowly-slowly catch the monkey. It got its startup capital when the Arms Deal became fait accompli and it has been gaining momentum ever since. We permit tsotsis to dwell among us and incrementally to take everything we value. And where is the blood? No, it wasn’t a bloodless coup. South Africans die because instead of hospitals and schools, they got a stake in corvettes. South Africans die because of misspent Nkandlalevel money. The list goes on. It is obscene. Why does it matter? The short answer is that it affects all of us materially. When evidence of official malfeasance comes to light, domestic and foreign investment takes a dive. That paralyses our best developmental intentions. When the organising principle in government is the jostling for position and favour in a hierarchy of tsotsis, the common weal suffers.

The underinvestment in Eskom is a case in point. The Bureau for Economic Research’s senior economist, Hugo Pienaar, has revised down his growth forecast or SA’s gross domestic product from 2.9% to 1.9% after Eskom’s publication of SA’s load-shedding schedule. It means we’ll become poorer yet, and the poorest among us will suffer the brunt of tsotsi rule.

That is clearly bad enough, but it is not the worst of it. Far worse is that our freedom is being stolen along with our tax contributions and our electricity. Increasingly, our freedom to do something about the misery of life in SA is that which is magnanimously granted us by the tsotsi regime. It means we permit ourselves to be co-opted into tsotsi life, or we die.

That explains the Economic Freedom Fighters.