Public spaces under fire

No one is safe amid string of violent attacks at public institutions across SA

- WENDY JASSON DA COSTA and ANITA NKONKI

BULLETS, gangs and fear have overrun South Africa’s public institutions, leaving citizens terrified in the very spaces where they should be safe.

This week, gunfire erupted in broad daylight outside the Booysens Magistrate’s Court in Gauteng, leaving two people dead. In another incident, two teachers were killed at Ntabankulu Primary School in the Eastern Cape. And as courts, hospitals and schools turn into battlegrounds, South Africans are increasingly asking who will keep them safe, if not the state.

“Without any doubt, the buck stops with the government,” said Prof André Duvenhage, political analyst at North-West University.

He said democracy itself was beginning to fracture under the weight of persistent violence and institutional failure.

“We have instability at the grassroots level and we are building a democracy on top of it, and that is the reason why democracy, in a way, is falling apart.”

Duvenhage said South Africa was showing the characteristics of a failing state, with high levels of political instability pointing to what he described as “statelessness — or hell on earth”.

“The first job of a state is to create order, and that is not the case in South Africa. We are a weakening state with mafia characteristics, and political assassinations are part of that. South Africa is collapsing into a mafia state where you cannot differentiate clearly between the political elite of the day and the criminal elite,” he said.