Anti-terrorism law has ushered permanent state of emergency

The spectre of the Suppres- sion of Terrorism Act of 2008 has rekindled the reign of fear occasioned by the infamous King’s Proclamation to the Nation of April 12, 1973 that was visited on the people for almost 40 years.

And from 1973 onwards it was easier to cow the nation into supplication and, therefore, silence because not so many people were as educated and enlightened as they are today. Thus an educated and enlightened elite prone to challenging anything and everything that the ruling elite stands for has replaced the generation that could accept the imposition of dictatorship in 1973 without putting up any form of challenge or resistance.

This explains why with the backdrop of two-thirds of the population living in abject poverty and a cocktail of other humanitarian crises weighing down on them, the ruling class and its accompanying baggage of bootlickers, grovellers and sycophants have amassed such wealth that they are enjoying a lifestyle of a First World economy.

And the people are only too happy to enjoy the occasional crumbs thrown their way whenever an excuse can be manufactured to summon them to Ludzidzini or some of the expensive but unproductive national summits often hosted to showcase their latest material acquisitions. That is all thanks to the King’s Proclamation to the Nation of 1973.

Then in 2005 the nation emerged into an era of constitutional rule only to find that nothing really has changed except legitimising what had happened in 1973 after the ruling class had manipulated the entire so-called political transformation process that gave birth to a new constitutional order.

Political power did not devolve to the people but remains an exclusive preserve of the ruling class.

Under the Tinkhundla system the people are nothing but pawns in a political game that the lucky ones have conveniently embraced as a poverty-alleviating project.

The paradox is that when in 1973 the ruling class used naked aggression to forcefully appropriate to itself all political power not to speak of all faculties of the nation’s human resource, in 2008 it used the poverty-alleviating institution of Parliament to rubber stamp its unconstitutional and just as draconian Suppression of Terrorism Act that is the successor to the notorious 60-Day Detention Order.

And if anyone was in doubt about the Tinkhundla Parliament as an effective legislative institution, now that doubt has been evaporated by the facts that just about confirm its role as a rubber stamp of whatever is desired by the ruling class. For if it was not, the 8th Parliament would have refused to be party to the draconian anti-terrorism legislation that is inherently also in breach of the constitution that is supposedly the supreme law of the land.

There is no way a right thinking person can abdicate their inalienable rights and freedoms to any other individual or authority whatsoever and then brag about democracy. Unfortunately this kind of lunacy was abroad when the 8th Parliament passed the anti-terrorism law.

Essentially what the anti-terrorism legislation seeks to achieve is no different to the objectives of the former 60-Day Detention Order.

The bottom-line is that citizens should leave real politics to the ruling class by remaining silent and pretend that all is well. In return the people can compete for a seat in the fattening ranch that is the toothless Parliament to which the ruling class has appropriated huge amounts of the taxpayer’s money or risk being jailed for exercising their inalienable rights and freedoms.

But with the changed circumstances from what was obtaining in 1973, will the Suppression of Corruption Act achieve its intended objective of keeping the people silent on matters of how their tax money is spent, in particular, and how they are governed in general?

Your guess is as good as mine. But the truth is that a growing number of people are not as naïve as the typical native that inhabited this country in 1973. While the education system that was inherited from the colonial area has deteriorated to dysfunctional depths, there are sons and daughters of the soil who have emerged from these ruins to claim their rightful places in the sun.

Those with no lineage to the ruling class and its concomitant baggage of bootlickers, grovellers and knee-bending sycophants and, therefore, with no tailor-made jobs, are very successful and highly sought after in the private sector both here and abroad.

Then there is a growing army of unemployed energetic young people who include graduates and school dropouts who will not keep silent, but will want to know of the whys and hows of their circumstances.

Not only that, they would want to know why the majority of the people are second-class citizens in their own country. They would want to know why ordinary people, including their own kith and kin, are being killed by a dysfunctional public health delivery system when the ruling regime can spend lavishly on parties and foreign shopping jaunts. They would want to know why they are being marginalised from appointment to certain positions that have been reserved for an exclusive group of people on the basis of their lineage.

And to silence this emancipated and educated section of the population would require more than draconian laws and more than 1001 Matsapha Maximum Prisons to contain, in which case this country might as well gird itself for a tumultuous political future. To this end the ruling class has been predictable in opting to employ force and coercion instead of looking for honest and genuine solutions to the crises facing this nation by engaging the people.

Instead what does the ruling regime do, it provides the trigger that the incumbent Prime Minister Sibusiso Barnabas Dlamini is to shatter once and for all the myth of peace and tranquility that is said to be the trade mark of this nation when that is further from the truth since the people have been forcefully coerced into silence.

And that silence can never translate into peace and tranquility even with the Suppression of Terrorism Act that has essentially thrust this country into a permanent state of emergency in tow.