Real freedom still eludes most South Africans

I DESPERATELY wanted to give a feel- good answer when asked by a talk show host what I made of Freedom Day on Tuesday. There is so much we have achieved since apartheid’s demise that counts in favour of warm and fuzzy celebrations.

We are free to sleep with someone who looks different from ourselves. We are free to roam the streets of any suburb. We are free to buy property anywhere. We are free to vote in regular elections. We are free to write what we like. We are free to speak our minds. We are free to form political parties.

We are, it would seem, free to be who we truly want to be.

Freedom seems alive and well in this weird and wonderful country of ours. Add a vuvuzela, a Bafana Bafana shirt and a 750ml bottle of Castle Lager all set to the Toto song, Miss the rains down in Africa, and only pre-prison Eugene TerreBlanche would not feel positively drunk with the insatiable taste of democratic freedom.

But, sorry to spoil the image folks, it is all a big fat lie. A big, fat, unsustainable lie. We’d better own up to reality and step up our national game if we are to avoid looking like a team ranked 90th in the world.

The vast majority of Saffers have not yet experienced Uhuru. The rest of us have no right to celebrate. We have only a right to feel survivor’s guilt.

Freedom is a tricky concept that has kept nerdish political philosophers busy for centuries. Isaiah Berlin, a former Oxford philosopher, distinguished between positive and negative liberty way back in 1958.

For our purposes, we can think of liberty as more or less a fancy term for freedom. Negative freedom means there are no obstacles in your way.

I am not, for example, preventing you from forming a political party by passing a law that says whoever reads this week’s column by McKaiser in Business Day is forbidden from forming a political party. That kind of law would rob you of negative freedom. It would place an obstacle in your path.

Positive freedom, on the other hand, is the presence of something as opposed to the absence of an obstacle. For example, if I give you money to form a political party and to put together a campaign, I am thereby giving you positive freedom. I am placing you in a position to use your negative freedom to effectively pursue goals you value but which could not be pursued in the absence of certain enabling conditions. It is because we value positive freedom that public goods such as education are important. They constitute positive freedom. They enable you to live a full life of your own choosing rather than leaving you free merely to dream.

Here is the unsexy result of this Politics 101 detour. The reason I experience survivor’s guilt on Freedom Day as a black middle-class intelligentsia type is that the vast majority of South Africans do not enjoy positive freedom. They merely enjoy negative freedom.

But negative freedom is pointless. Or, at the risk of self-declared elders rapping me over the knuckles, negative freedom is important but should not be the ultimate point of why we destroyed apartheid.

Yes, the freedom to vote, to live where you want to, to have sex with whoever agrees, to form political parties, to speak your mind and to associate with whom you wish to, are critically important. But we fought for positive freedom. Surely?

If a young Rolihlahla in Qunu is free to live in Houghton but lacks access to goods such as decent education, which would enable him to have a shot at earning power that would in turn lead to him being able to afford a house in Houghton, then Rolihlahla may as well as still be living in an apartheid state.

Negative freedom is what we get excited about on Freedom Day. It is what we wash down our braaied meat with. But we should keep our eye on the deeper goal of liberal democracy, which is the enjoyment of positive freedom by every single South African. In a slogan, we still need social justice for all before we can declare SA a country in which substantive, positive freedom is enjoyed across the country. But how the heck do we get there?

This is a complex question that deserves more than a blog inch or three devoted to it. Forgive my terse suggestion for now. We will get to substantive freedom by doing at least two things.

First, our state is sickly. It suffers from systemic corruption, cronyism and tenderpreneurship.

This needs to stop and be replaced with a new culture of merit- based, career civil service. If there is no political will to effect this change, then let’s vote for a different government.


Second, we need to take responsibility for our own wellbeing. Yes, it is false to claim that most poor people are poor due to laziness or unstrategic life choices. But a mix of a welfare cushion and Steve Biko-inspired psychological independence and self-actualisation could make a huge difference. Democratic SA may have turned 16 this week but it was far from a sweet birthday occasion.

http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=107592

This house believes that the state is right to ....

Peeps, you are all invited to this debate; it promises to be fascinating!

FREE entry, and great food and drinks served afterwards while we all schmooz pretentiously...

FULL MOTION: This house believes that the state is right to place state-owned enterprises at the centre of economic growth...

FOR THE MOTION: 1) Jak Koseff (brilliant, and brilliantly flamboyant speaker (no, not gay!) & economic policy geek of late .... a comrade now, sans his Hegel days, working for Joburg City);2) Neva Makgetla (excellent economist: chief economist at Development Bank of Southern Africa; Business Day columnist & a speaker that, uhm, one might describe as brutally honest, or as a TV producer friend said, "curt" ... which bodes well for this parliamentary-style debate)

AGAINST THE MOTION: 1) Joe Roussous (weirdo. translation: into maths, and physics. and stuff. Excellent speaker...surprisingly not boring, despite being trained at the Wits Debate Union...should ruffle Koseff's feathers nicely. Fresh from the World Debate Champs);2) Leon Louw (Right Wing par excellence...yet surprisingly respectful of other human beings; a great natural debater and - in my view - the economist type who puts the argument for a small state most compellingly in public debate; executive director of Free Market Foundation. 'Nuff said.)

MODERATOR: One Eusebius McKaiser

TIME: 530pm for 6pm

WHEN?: TODAY!!!!! (Thursday, 29th April)WHERE? Gibs Business School; Meville Road, Illovo, Joburg

RSVP Katie McNally mcnallyk@gibs.co.zaBe there or be square!

Eskom generates an ethical dilemma

MORAL philosophers indulge in intellectual masturbation when ethical dilemmas are thrown their way. Courtesy of an enthusiastic whistle-blower at Eskom who found a seemingly conscientious MP, Pieter van Dalen, on the opposition benches, a classic ethical dilemma has been put on the table for those of us so inclined . The whistle- blower leaked a confidential document. The MP happily accepted it and after perusing its content put it all in the public domain on grounds of public interest.

Eskom is unhappy. It claims commercial sensitivity required the document to remain confidential. The chair of the parliamentary portfolio committee on public enterprises, Vytjie Mentor, labelled the MP’s behaviour unethical and illegal. An ethical challenge can be clearly stated in a question that might have been yanked from an ethics examination paper. Was the opposition MP ethically justified in his actions? The Democratic Alliance (DA) politician’s action is ultimately justifiable but it is not so obvious why. Let’s rehearse the moral argument in his favour.

Not all of the salient facts are known or agreed on by Eskom, many members of Parliament and the rest of civil society. This makes it difficult to assess whether the MP did the right thing since the utilitarian principle he acted on, which I discuss shortly, is not controversial. It is the principle’s application to the facts that matter. An absence of factual certainty, however, ultimately helps his utilitarian case.

There has been widespread public suspicion for months now that Eskom has been selling electricity to large corporations such as BHP Billiton and Anglo American at unit prices smaller than those of electricity sold to municipalities and ultimately millions of households. Suspicion has been that the major electricity tariff hikes we have been dumped with may well have been smaller but for these contracts containing preferential rates of supply to large companies.

One particularly callous upshot of all this is the possibility that the little people are cross-subsidising the operational expenditure of the big guys. Add to all of this the additional macroeconomic insult that some companies bring iron ore from abroad, smelt it here and then export the intermediary product for further use in value chains elsewhere, and Eskom’s preferential treatment goes from being economically unfair on individual households to being economically disastrous for some of our industry sectors .

However, while this story makes sense in principle, at least one official from the National Energy Regulator of SA (Nersa) made a counterargument in a radio interview several months back. The counterclaim was that while the nominal unit fee charged for electricity to the big guys is lower than that paid by the rest of us, the cost of supplying electricity to big clients is significantly less, so that profit margins generated for Eskom from those customer segments are in fact much higher than profits flowing from the segment comprising us little people. The unspoken implication was that the big guys, if anything, may well be cross-subsiding us. Supply cost structures are not uniform across customer segments.

These are two equally coherent stories. But not both of them can be true. It is a matter of empirical investigation which version is correct. Given the impact of the tariff hikes on inflation and thereby the standard of living of millions of South Africans, finding out which of the stories is true matters. When massive loans like the one granted by the World Bank are added to the mix, with the reality that future generations will be saddled with debt not of their own choosing, the lack of factual certainty becomes ethically significant. We are forced to adjudicate between the Nersa story and the contradictory intuitions of civil society and ordinary South Africans.

That is the context within which the DA MP’s decision was taken. What is an MP to do when he or she is landed with a document that sheds light on the material disagreement about certain facts that are of substantive ethical significance? This is, furthermore, against the background of a cabinet minister who has, according to the MP in question, failed to offer illuminating answers to parliamentary questions on the matter, so “second best” solutions are off the table.

The MP applied an ethical principle that can be roughly stated as follows. If the overall consequences of doing something will have overwhelming benefit for society and no gross injustices are suffered in the process, then that action is ethically justified. This principle, with its built-in consideration about justice, is surely reasonable. Killing someone would be grossly unjust even if it would make most of us happy. The principle is therefore not blind to justice.

However, given that Eskom is a monopoly and that the wellbeing of millions is affected by the price hikes, directly and indirectly, getting to the bottom of whether or not Eskom’s factual claims are accurate matters. No gross economic injustice will result to Eskom, BHP Billiton or Anglo American . Since the document’s public existence takes us a step closer to resolving these factual disputes, the whistle-blower and MP’s actions, even if possibly illegal, are ethically justified.

http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=107082

National debate? More like clash of igorant armies!

Anyone who has been following South African political discourse in recent weeks will be forgiven for thinking that rationality, like elitism, is apparently not for everyone. Rationality and cool-headedness offend many of our politicians. Consequently, the state of political discourse in South Africa is downright embarrassing. This impoverishes our democracy profoundly.

In 1994, we set out to live in a deliberative and a participatory democracy, which meant the embrace of an ideal society in which ideas are coolly exchanged by all of us, and everyone plays by the rules of reasoned debate.

This ideal remains tragically elusive, 16 years into the democratic game. Why? What explains this sad state of affairs? And, without ripping the humanity and emotion out of political discourse (which are not unimportant features), how do we nevertheless improve the quality of our political discourse?

We are asked by all and sundry to "debate this and that" as if an invitation to debate is by itself something terribly virtuous and praiseworthy. But before we can debate any of the substantive issues at the heart of the "national debate", we need to be equipped to structure political argument more rationally, and recognise certain rules of engagement that can help us back onto the path towards a deliberative and participatory democracy.

First, however, we need to get a full grip on the problem. Way too often, politicians engage each other, and us, in irrational exchanges - and behave in ways that are, quite simply, distasteful. The most dramatic recent example, of course, is Julius Malema's display of political childishness when he expelled a BBC journalist from a press conference.

Malema's performance was in the first instance an aesthetic assault on the senses - but if these kinds of antics were merely aesthetically jarring, maybe we would have less reason to get nervous about our body politic; unfortunately, that is not the end of the story. The contents of the arguments (or what pass as arguments) are limp, too.

Take, for example, the response of Lindiwe Sisulu, the minister of defence, to the motion of no confidence tabled in parliament by COPE. Using invective that sounded like it had been penned by Malema, she desisted from engaging with the content of the motion and instead tried to personally attack opposition politicians, belittling them and challenging their right to table a motion of that kind at all.

Choice quotes from Sisulu's display of intolerance and irrationality include: "Why are we even debating such silliness? How do we come to even have it on our order paper? But importantly: how do we as parliament deal with such frivolity in future?"

She proceeded to contemplate a change to parliamentary rules to stop such a motion in future - but could not, unfortunately, find "reference in our rules to how parliament can deal with such a waste of time and resources". Her final insult was saved for COPE's parliamentary leader, Methodist bishop Mvume Dandala, at whom she shouted: "Get out and go and serve the church!"

This is also an example of a distasteful response, of course. But it is more than that. If we ignore the inflammatory passion of the speaker, and assess the content of her response to the motion, it is clear that it is irrational.

First, she is attacking the right of opposition leaders to table such a motion. This shows either a basic lack of understanding about the rules of parliament, or a pernicious attempt to ignore them. One smells the latter motivation, since the minister must know the rules, surely? It is an attempt to dent the credibility of a debate opponent, rather than simply getting on with engaging the basis of their political criticism. It is hardly a sophisticated example of playing the person rather than the ball.

Second, the response shows no attempt to understand the content of an opposing party's argument, or to dismantle it logically, evidentially, and with more acceptable rhetorical skill and flair than being rude and abrasive. Sisulu's performance in parliament on that day was not merely in bad political taste. It was also a master class in irrational and destructive political discourse.

And if you think that the ruling party has a monopoly on this dialogical skills deficit, you are very wrong. Irrationality is found everywhere in our body politic.

Take the Democratic Alliance's Helen Zille in the aftermath of the death of Eugene Terre Blanche. She failed to recognise an opportunity to steal our hearts and minds by showing emotional maturity and imaginative leadership on "the race question". Instead, she went on a tirade about the plight of farmers (as opposed to both farmers and farm workers), warning us, most melodramatically, about "a tidal wave of pent-up rage and frustration". One senior member of one of the mostly Afrikaner civil rights organisations joked with me, in an accurate aside, that Zille's response was less balanced than anything from Afriforum or Solidarity. But this response was hers to make. And perhaps it speaks to her constituency, so we cannot criticise it too harshly.

More importantly, however, is that there is an aspect of this reaction to the murder of Terre Blanche that demonstrated irrationality, too. Zille immediately sought to link the event of Terre Blanche's killing to the singing of a struggle song by Malema, even though the police had barely started their investigation.

Zille's response was not evidence-based. It was mere assertion. And it was an assertion motivated by political opportunism. This is irrational. Only claims that are proportional to the available evidence are worth putting in the public domain - at least if you fancy yourself as someone who respects the rules of logic and reasoned debate.

Why, you might wonder, are we saddled with this shoddy state of political debate? There are at least three reasons.

First, politicians are human. And humans are not logic machines. We are motivated by our most deeply held beliefs, which often colour the way we interpret evidence and influence the manner in which we respond to others.

Second, we do not teach critical thinking and debate in our schools or universities. Only the nerdish among us join a debate club. So our politicians often join parliament never having been taught the hard skills of structured debate and persuasive speaking.

Third, and most importantly, we are still suffering the negative aspects of the legacy of liberation politics. The ANC, as a liberation movement, did not and could not honour the rules of open, deliberative debate as deeply as one hoped it now would as a parliamentary party. Some writers claim otherwise, but this strikes me as exaggeration at best. A few of the leaders of the struggle might have had late-night fireside chats, but in essence the ANC had to operate like an army with an army's top-down approach to decision making. Since the ANC, in turn, dominates our political landscape, we collectively suffer its inability to adapt quickly enough to parliamentary democracy.

One macabre solution is simply to wait for a generational shift to happen; no one lives forever. In the meantime, debate- coaching and critical-thinking classes in parliament might be a good starting point. It will be way more useful than induction processes that simply show members of parliaments the seats in which they will be sleeping for the next five years. We have a massive challenge on our hands.

http://www.timeslive.co.za/local/article408986.ece/National-debate-More-like-the-clash-of-ignorant-armies

How ET condom hysteria betrays our homophobia

THE media scores a Malema-like G for its performance last week. Ordinary South Africans were equally unimpressive. This follows the publication of the story about a used condom that had allegedly been found at the scene of the murder of Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) leader Eugene TerreBlanche.

The police immediately denied the claim. Hundreds of homophobic inferences and comments on social networking sites followed. This was topped up by the Sunday press running with the theme, captured in a particularly lurid header in one paper that asked, “Was ET gay and bonking darkies?”

The vast majority of comments assumed that the alleged condom confirms the existence of a homosexual relationship between TerreBlanche and his alleged killers. It was also assumed that this gay motif now transforms the murder into a comical farce worthy of a film script. Excessive racial and political angst now replaced by the hilarity of buggery. Typical comments on Facebook included “Hectic!”, “Maybe this will bring blacks and whites together, white man wanting sex with a black man”, and “ Was this a labour dispute or did the boy call his pimp?”

One may write off these comments as the usual online shooting from the hip. But that might be naive. These sites also allow less filtering of attitudes and so might well reveal brutal attitudinal truths. Similar sentiments have been expressed on radio talk shows, for example. Worse still have been the replication of these sentiments by writers who actually had time to digest the Saturday Star’s story ahead of their own publications hitting the streets. But that did not stop variations on the speculation game. A number of Sunday papers interpreted the alleged condom’s presence as evidence that TerreBlanche may have been “gay”, might have “bonk (ed) gays” and was involved in acts of “sodomy”.

Yet, why does a used condom’s presence imply that anyone in the room must have been gay ?

The presence of a condom is consistent with a number of possibilities, all of which the media ignored because doing so would get in they way of the wonderfully frivolous reduction of the murder story to a gay orgy gone wrong. Frivolity sells. Evidence-informed reasoning doesn’t.
For example, a used condom could mean that a victim was raped before he was killed. It could mean that the perpetrators enjoy necrophilia and killed someone in order to perform a sexual act on a corpse. It could mean that the victim had sex with someone else in the room some time before the killers even gained entry to the room. It could mean they were bisexual. And, yes, it could also mean a gay orgy had gone horribly wrong. Who knows which interpretation is the right one? A condom’s presence raises a million more questions than it answers.

Why, then, do ordinary South Africans and respectful reporters and at least one editor indulge in salacious assumptions about consensual sexual relationships and homosexuality in the absence of a full investigation and factual findings made by a court of law? Simple. Because the media refuses to let fact get in the way of projecting prejudices onto the death of Eugene Terreblanche. A week later and even one of the accused has now withdrawn the claim of “sodomy”.

Last week was therefore both a low point in our political lives — courtesy of the AWB’s general secretary Andre Visagie and African National Congress Youth League president Julius Malema — and a low point in the free media’s life, courtesy of unthinking narratives imposed on a story that is very much still unfolding. We simply do not miss an opportunity to affirm our fears and prejudices. Doing so has become a national pastime.

Furthermore, the hasty inferences that have been drawn all around the condom story is, of course, exaggerated by underlying homophobic attitudes. These homophobic attitudes are nonviolent and often emanate from otherwise progressive quarters and so can be easy to miss. Subtle instances of homophobia remain, well, homophobia. And so it is important to also highlight this strand in the media’s interpretation of what a used condom does or doesn’t indicate.
If a woman had been killed allegedly by two men who handed themselves over and a condom was then found in her room, the possibility of rape and murder (as opposed to consensual sex and murder) would be the presumptive truth. But three men and a condom must be a gay orgy.

Why? Because homosexuality is regarded as silly, fringe and outrageous, and so we have a right to be lurid and self-indulgent.

So much for the battery of gay rights we brag about. The gap between gay rights jurisprudence and homophobic attitudes against gay men and women on the ground is gigantic. The past few weeks have been shameful. The ghost of TerreBlanche, the studio antics of Visagie and the foul mouth of Malema are only the tip of the iceberg, I’m afraid.

http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=106438

Mantashe and Visagie are united in irrationality

IRRATIONALITY and intolerance are vices that do not discriminate. They are both colour-blind and apolitical. Over the past three days, for example, they befriended both a member of the African National Congress (ANC) , Gwede Mantashe, and a member of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), Andre Visagie.

These men, who quickly became drunk on their friendship with irrationality and intolerance, displayed embarrassing resistance to reasoned debate and tolerance of an interlocutor. After all, reasoned debate and tolerance are enemies of irrationality and intolerance. Both Mantashe and Visagie were on the vicious side. Even good old patriarchy made a cameo appearance, as we will see. Intellectual virtue, it would appear then, is not for our politicians. They prefer personal attack over demonstrating weaknesses in another’s evidence or their reasoning.

The first incident happened at an ANC press conference on Wednesday. Gwede Mantashe, the secretary-general who interacts with the media almost nonstop, and so should know better, dismissed a question from a black journalist by hurling the insult that she was a coconut. The journalist from AFP asked, “Why, after 16 years, is Julius still singing the song ‘kill the boer’?” Mantashe fired back, “I don’t know why Julius should be explaining that song ... I call that a coconut approach where you have a black face, but your interest is white.”

This response is irrational. Being a coconut — whatever that might mean — is no bar to asking a valid question or putting a persuasive argument on the debate table.

Mantashe was also being intolerant. The subtext of his rude dismissal was, “How dare you imply we may be wrong? How dare you, particularly as a fellow black?! And a fellow black woman at that??” This does not count as a rational or tolerant response to the question or its embedded argument. This would be no different to saying that someone who argues that the Equality Act is possibly unconstitutional must be on a Malema payroll. Only a response dismantling someone’s logic or their evidence is good enough.

Of course it is human nature to see the vested interest that someone might have in the conclusion they are arguing for. If I, as a black man, argue for black economic empowerment (BEE), and I am a businessman to boot, it is tempting to focus on the likelihood that I am motivated, at least in part, by the material benefit I stand to enjoy if BEE continues to be implemented. But so what? Vested interest and sound logic are not inherently opposed to one another. We need to stop obsessing about people’s backgrounds, their material or ideological interests in a debate or their personal motivations for arguing this or that. Instead, we should engage the content of their arguments.

The second incident involved Visagie who stormed out of an eNews studio during a recording of this week’s Africa 360 hosted by Chris Maroleng on Wednesday. When an exchange between Visagie and another guest, Lebohang Pheko, got too heated for his liking, he threw the microphone on the floor, and stormed out. But the drama did not end there. He turned back and menacingly and threateningly walked back towards the other guest, threatening her to not dare interrupt him again. It was unclear how she would be punished. Suitably, no doubt.

Some argue that the host did not play a good facilitating role. Maroleng himself may have been patriarchal in protecting “this poor woman”. That may or may not be true. Set that issue aside for now. Visagie, ironically enough, is also displaying intolerance of a similar kind to that of Mantashe. They are united in their patriarchal rejection of a woman’s right to engage men.

In both cases the confluence of race and gender is clear. Whereas Mantashe displayed the worst kind of black male dominance over black women, on Visagie’s part we saw a baasskap mentality that resisted the illegitimate demand of a black female interlocutor to disagree with the baas’s logic. Who could have thought that an ANC member and an AWB member could be united so tragicomically? The patriarchal history of our society, which finds expression in the political arena, can unite even men who otherwise occupy diametrically opposed positions.

What are the lessons to be learnt? The most important one is that we all have a right to speak. A right to speak should not be earned by undergoing a sex change from female to male or bleaching your skin to become white or burning your opposition party membership card to join the ANC. Senior leaders, such as Mantashe, must set an acceptable example. Else organisations like the ANC Youth League will feel justified in following this resistance to reasoned debate, as they did yesterday when they expelled a BBC journalist from a press conference.

Before we can even talk about the technicalities of the rules of logic and practice them on the airwaves and at press conferences, let’s first accept and respect each other’s unqualified right to be part of the national conversation. Deliberative democracy requires us to see and accept each other as equal partners in the debate arena.

If 'boer' song did inspire killers, would Malema be culpable?

IF WE assume, purely for the sake of argument, that Eugene TerreBlanche’s alleged killers were inspired by the lyrics “kill the boer”, would that imply that Julius Malema has political blood on his hands? It is not so obvious that this question must be answered in the affirmative. Yet, many who debate the connection between the song and the murder (both those arguing for the connection and those arguing against it) implicitly assume that if a connection came to light, Malema would be politically responsible or blameworthy (at least in part) for the death of TerreBlanche. This assumption is hasty and, in my view, wrong.

First, it seems odd to impute moral or political guilt to someone based on how his or her rhetoric was recklessly misused by some other party. If we applied this principle consistently, we would place undue pressure on each other to take responsibility for other moral agents’ actions which were based on their own moral reasoning about what is right or wrong.

In fact, we would be asking Malema to assume that all black people are simpletons or automatons who should not be trusted as capable of distinguishing right from wrong. This assumption is deeply offensive (because it robs “ordinary” people of moral agency) and also patently false (no one needs a degree or money or power to be responsible for their actions, disaffected farmworkers included).

Consider this analogy. To hold Malema responsible, if it turns out the lyrics inspired the murder, would be about as fair as holding a film maker or artist responsible for the actions of a psychotic teenager who gets inspired by a film or heavy metal song and who then takes a sword to school and kills or assaults anyone crossing his mad path. Imputing direct moral blame to the film maker is misplaced. It is the teen whose agency should be indicted.

Further , the complex psychology he or she possesses is based on the accumulation of a set of life experiences, which cannot be reduced to the trigger of the murder, which may have been the watching of a film. After all, many things can trigger a madman’s madness. Can we really expect each other to know the sensibilities of all our fellow citizens that intimately? That is an unreasonable moral and political burden, surely.

And so, similarly, if it is true that the alleged killers had experienced a history of verbal and physical abuse by TerreBlanche, as they reportedly claim, and that this song triggered their gratuitous response to their own unhappiness, it is unfair to shoot a moral arrow Malema’s way. The farmworkers ought to have known better. They are the sole authors of their own immoral actions.

Perhaps, however, one might think that Malema is at least indirectly blameworthy. He ought to have foreseen the reasonable likelihood of such comments and lyrics leading to murder. Is this assumption correct? And, in such a case, would it follow that he does carry indirect political and moral blame for what happened? Maybe. Again, however, the moral calculus is more complex than seems to be the case at first glance. It depends fundamentally on one’s analysis of just how predictable the effect of a particular song on others may be.

But surely no one could reasonably predict that singing a dated liberation song could lead to death? If it was obvious that such a tragedy will likely result, why did the same proverbially unwashed and uneducated masses (or two of them) not grab an actual machine-gun and attack perceived enemies of President Jacob Zuma when Malema declared a willingness to kill for Zuma way back? This counterfactual speaks volumes. If equally inflammatory songs lead to different outcomes, one of nonviolence and one of murder, then the key moral difference must be in the reasoning and choices of the audience. It is they who should then be the object of moral scorn and not the karaoke singer.

This does not mean that singing the song is morally or politically acceptable. Malema would do us all a huge favour if he stopped the singing. It is creating needless angst. But to jump from these conclusions to the claim that Malema is morally and politically responsible for TerreBlanche’s murder is unjustified.

It is becoming a national hobby in SA to look for every opportunity to have our prejudices confirmed. As a caller to my talk show demanded, quite tellingly, two weeks ago, “Can’t we find Malema guilty of something?” Folks, we need to prepare for the possibility that Malema is not omnipotent.
http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=105377