of his predecessor, Anwar Sadat. Shortly after his resignation, he was arrested with his sons and put on trial for crimes against the Egyptian people. He suffered a heart attack while being questioned by police, was convicted of corruption, and sent to prison. He died in 2015.
In Libya protests culminated in the death of the country’s leader, Muammar Gaddafi. Like Mubarak, Gaddafi had run his socialist dictatorship with almost no opposition for more than 30 years. Rights activists had been jailed and tortured and opposition politics suppressed. Gaddafi was all-powerful and free to act with impunity. But the illusion of stability created by his suppression of civil rights was not sufficient to withstand the growing embitterment and unmet expectations of many Libyans. By early 2011 even his once all-powerful security services were powerless to stem the tide of public anger. Surrounded by a small company of bodyguards, Gaddafi was on the run, seeking refuge in small towns as the rebellion closed in around him. Hunted like a wild animal, he hid in a drainpipe but was caught by protesters. They beat him in the street, causing his death; one gruesome description related how his former subjects bayoneted him in the rear end – a brutal end to a brutal reign.
Less than a year after Mohamed Bouazizi’s death, much of the Middle East and North Africa were engulfed in turmoil. Protests or changes of government occurred across a belt that stretched from Rabat on Morocco’s east coast to Muscat on the west coast of Oman – a distance of over 4,000 miles. Sixteen countries were swept up in the turmoil, which ranged from civil wars to mass protests and multiple government overthrows.
The brutal civil war in Syria, which The Economist described best as a ‘blood-soaked mess of wars within a war’, can be traced back directly to the Tunisian uprising. So, too, can the rise of ISIS, which took advantage of the ensuing chaos to establish itself in northern Iraq and Syria. Heightened tensions between Sunni and Shia Arabs, which still threaten to cause a pan-Middle Eastern civil war, have much of their recent origin in the Arab Spring. Russia in turn exploited American intransigence over the Middle East to usurp some of the influence that the United States had previously exerted as the dominant foreign power in that region. That in turn shifted the balance of power between Russia on the one hand and the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) on the other.
It is amazing to think that in many respects this chain of events was started by a vegetable hawker – an otherwise unremarkable young man who grew very angry that his life’s expectations were unmet and that nobody was listening. Evidently that sentiment ran deep, and his action was the spark that ignited the powder keg.
Why does this matter to us? If you live in South Africa you already suspect the answer: because the circumstances that led to Mohamed Bouazizi setting himself alight describe very closely the daily struggle of millions of poor young South Africans. Massive unemployment, an out-of-touch, arrogant and corrupt government, and a rising tide of public violence.
I work for a think tank, the IRR, which among other things advises organisations and companies about social and economic trends and how the future of South Africa is likely to unfold. In the immediate aftermath of the Tunisian uprising, we were kept very busy answering requests for information about whether South Africa could go the same way. Our answer was a qualified ‘not yet’, and a clear ‘no’ if the growing frustrations of young people were resolved. But that was more than five years ago, and in the time that has elapsed since then, tensions have increased and economic performance has weakened while the government seems even more out of touch.
Now, if we are asked whether South Africa might face massive economic and political destabilisation, our answers are more guarded. This is not to suggest that South Africa will descend into the chaos of the Middle East. To be clear from the outset, we do not think it will, and none of the scenarios that appear in this book describes worlds as violent and chaotic as what we see today in the Middle East. But political change and economic destabilisation can take many forms, and we are headed (hurtling might be a better word) towards our own unique brand of trouble.
Put differently, can there be any doubt that there is a South African Mohamed Bouazizi out there already? A smart, hardworking young man who, against the odds, is doing his best to look after his family. He probably also did not complete high school and looked for a job but could not find one, so he turned to hawking to make a living for his family. He too probably faces harassment and abuse from the police because he does not have the right permit. At night, when he goes home, he shares his stories of hardship with his peers. Around them they see the wealth and prosperity of South Africa’s small middle class. In newspapers they read of how politicians continuously loot the country. On the television news they watch their elected leaders’ undignified squabbling.
You can gain no better window into the hopeless frustrations of life in many poor communities than to read the story of one Daniel Mulaudzi, whose shack in Hammanskraal on the outskirts of Pretoria was demolished on the orders of the Tshwane local council, formerly under the control of the African National Congress (ANC). The demolition was ordered because he had built his shack on a piece of land owned by the council but without its permission − a point he and members of the community later disputed, explaining that a councillor had given them permission to build. Nonetheless, what happened next is a warning of how close the South African government is to setting off its own powder keg. According to a news report:
Daniel Mulaudzi, 53, said the Red Ants security company came to their area on Monday and demolished houses.
‘They were wearing blue overalls. We thought they wouldn’t do anything as we are legal here. They started shooting at us and demolished our shacks. We were standing and not doing anything,’ he said.
Sitting on a couch where his shack once was, he told of the pain he felt as he watched people tear down his home and make off with some of his belongings. Mulaudzi said he was unemployed and did not know how he would rebuild his life.
‘It’s painful what they did to me. I don’t even have corrugated steel to even rebuild. I’m unemployed and don’t know what I will do to rebuild. I slept out in the cold because we have nowhere to go. They must return our material. They even took things from our bags. Clothes, money, even our ID books were taken,’ he said.
Mulaudzi told of how he and his family spent the night out in the open. Apart from his building materials having been taken, he is now gripped by fear of losing his furniture to theft.
‘We sat in front of a fire the entire night to keep warm because if we leave they will take our belongings. We have been living here for five months. They said it was legal for people to live here, which is when we moved in. We were surprised to see them removing us,’ he said.1
My colleagues and I followed that story closely and learned that the tragedy of the evictions extended far beyond the Hammanskraal residents who lost their homes. That same night, as Daniel Mulaudzi sat around the fire, guarding his possessions, another man by the name of Sam Tshabalala was mourning the death of his brother, Elias.
Elias and Sam Tshabalala were both unemployed and had been hired as casual labourers at a rate of R150 a day by the company contracted by the Tshwane council to demolish the Hammanskraal shacks. At a point during the evictions the community turned on the casual workers. Sam Tshabalala was amongst those who managed to escape, but his brother was caught and burned alive by the people trying to save their shacks. A later news report said that the company that had hired the Tshabalala brothers had offered to donate cabbages for his funeral.
The whole incident is an all-too-common window into the cruel brutality of life for many South Africans − the poor fighting the poor just to save their homes or to earn R150 for a day of menial work. South Africans are wrong if they think this kind of thing can continue, day after day, without it one day tearing the country to pieces. Less than a year after the events at Hammanskraal, the ANC lost its majority
