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STEVEN FRIEDMAN
If we allow democracy’s foes to target those we do not admire, we make it likely that they will come after us and those we do value.
Fadiel Adams, MP and founder and leader of the National Coloured Congress, is not a politician those who value democracy have reason to admire.
He espouses a brand of ‘coloured nationalism’ which sees black people in the Western Cape as a threat – he has claimed that many hail from the Eastern Cape, in tones which suggest that this makes them lesser beings. He revealed his attitude to women when he told a fellow MP whose questioning he disliked that the only woman ‘who screams at me is the one I sleep with.’
So it is no surprise that Adams is widely seen as a local devotee of the hard right politics which is threatening democracy around the world.
But none of this means that we can afford to look away or cheer when he is arrested, transported from Cape Town to KwaZulu Natal in a manner which seems designed to inflict as much discomfort as possible and is, at the time this is written, held in prison.
Serious concern
This may be a serious problem for democracy here because Adams is also a loud critic of KwaZulu Natal police commissioner Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi. He has repeatedly accused the general of corruption.
The problem becomes more serious when we consider that Adams is not accused of stealing or using violence against another person – his crime stems from a visit he paid to a prisoner accused of killing a political activist.
We are still to hear what crimes Adams is alleged to have committed by visiting the prisoner. But what we know so far suggests that there is, at the very least, a possibility that Adams has been targeted because he was trying to hold the police to account.
Several previous columns have spelled out the background which ensures that Adams’s arrest could be a problem.
Since he made the allegations, Mkhwanazi has been treated with great deference by Parliament, the Madlanga Commission, virtually all politicians, and the media. He has not been asked to explain the gap between his claims and the evidence.
None of them have asked him why he claimed that criminal networks had infiltrated the judiciary and politics, though no damning evidence has yet been produced that any judge or senior politician is in the pay of organised crime. Nor have they asked him to explain why the political killings task team he champions had a less than one in five success rate. Or why his initial claims targeted only people associated with a particular political camp.
The only public figure who dismissed his claims is Adams. And he is now behind bars waiting trial, apparently because he visited a prisoner. He has been arrested, and taken on a 30-hour road trip in a police vehicle, by the KwaZulu Natal police which is headed, of course, by the general he has challenged.
We don’t need to admire Adams or his politics to see why this looks so worrying.
Despite his current halo, Mkhwanazi is an authority figure who wields power. When an authority figure can trigger two inquiries which investigate those who he wants investigated, and when the only person in the process who rejects his version of events is arrested, people who value democracy and fairness should be very concerned.
On the surface at least, it creates the impression that what we have been watching since Mkhwanazi first made his claims is not the fearless attempt to end corruption which just about everyone in the national debate is cheering, but a process in which one police general has been given a license to decide what is true and who should be a target – and to lock up anyone who challenges his version.
It should be obvious that, if this is what is happening, people in uniform are being allowed to wield a power which democracy is meant to deny them.
It is, of course, entirely possible that Adams’s accusations that Mkhwanazi is corrupt are false. But, if they are, Mkhwanazi’s remedy in a democratic justice system is to sue him, not to throw him in prison.
And it is also possible that the police have a plausible case that Adams really did break the law. But, if they do, they need to tell us a great deal more than they have until now. Police and prosecutors often say before a trial exactly why they have charged an accused person but we know very little about the case against Adams.
Ignoring principle
The issue at this stage is not whether Adams is right or wrong, innocent or guilty. It is whether the national debate – the politicians, media and public figures who decide what the mainstream should be discussing –can recognise a threat to democracy when it sees it.
It very clearly cannot.
This is so not because it should be rallying to Adam’s defence and hailing him as a martyr, as his supporters have done. It is because it has not reacted to his arrest with the same zeal for truth and for holding authority to account as it claimed when Mkhwanazi made his allegations.
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When Mkhwanazi made his claims, no-one who cheered him on could possibly claim to know whether they were accurate since they hadn’t been tested. Similarly, we should not need to know whether the police have a case against Adams to say that his arrest looks like a threat to our freedom and to demand answers.
To give credit where it is true, just about the only national figure to recognise the problem is EFF leader Julius Malema, who has accused police of making a ‘hero out of nothing’ of Adams by arresting him and hauling him off by road. He is not endorsing Adams but warning what the police action may mean.
If we are serious about protecting democracy, and we see events which could threaten it, we will be unable to protect it if we assume that authority figures are acting as they should unless we have hard evidence that they are not. Democracy will survive only if people take the opposite approach.
In this case, this means that, when the only public figure to challenge a police general is arrested by the police who that general commands, we ought to demand answers from the general and from the police service of which he is part.
This is not happening because the national debate here is not interested in principles, which are applied equally to all. To those who shape it, freedom and fairness are essential for those they favour, but are not meant for anyone else.
Every now and again, something happens to remind them that freedom and fairness are for everyone or for no-one, that if they suspend it to get at people they dislike, they remove a protection which they need.
And when their bias extends to cheering or remaining silent when members of parliament who challenge generals are arrested for visiting prisoners, it threatens to give power a free pass in a way which may hurt us all.
This article was first published by Professor Steven Friedman in his blog “Against The Tide”.
