By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
Former president Thabo Mvuyelwa Mbeki believes the United Kingdom (UK) riots have a lesson to teach South Africa, warning against a looming ‘riotous rampage’.
Riots and unrest fuelled by xenophobia and misinformation surrounding the tragic killing of three girls in a stabbing incident swept across the country in more than a week of violence that saw hundreds of people arrested.
Protests by far-right groups escalated into clashes with police in multiple towns, which saw hotels housing asylum seekers torched and mosques and businesses run by ethnic and religious minorities attacked.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer “utterly” condemned “far-right thuggery” as government ministers promised harsh punishments for those taking part in the violence, which also prompted large-scale counter demonstrations across the country.
More than 500 people have been charged in relation to the disorder and at least 170 sentenced, many being sent to jail.
King Charles III had to send out a “heartfelt appeal” and call for the nation to unite around “shared values of mutual respect and understanding”.
The former president felt like this image resonates with the South African reality, an image of those “who feel excluded and abandoned.”
What the racist rioting exposed
Mbeki quoted writer Jason Cowley who had said the riots had revealed an “England atomised, an England in pieces.”
“The King, perhaps more in hope than expectation, has called for the nation to unite around “shared values of mutual respect and understanding”. That may be wishful thinking. “He must know, or at least sense, that the harrowing ethno-sectarian violence and racist attacks of recent weeks on mosques and hotels sheltering asylum seekers in provincial towns have revealed something dark and shocking: an England atomised, an England in pieces.”
England is not locked in civil war and nor is it as riven and culturally divided as France, Sweden, Germany or the Netherlands, European countries where nationalist populist movements are rising fast. But the riots, occurring in some of the most deprived areas of the country, towns where people believe they are without political representation, have revealed intractable class, social and geographic divisions.
Starmer was compelled to use the full force of the Hobbesian state to quash anarchy and reimpose public order. He acted swiftly and decisively to contain agitators and neo-fascists who had been inflamed by misinformation circulating freely on Telegram, X/Twitter, Facebook, TikTok and Signal.
Mbeki said that much like England, South Africa must find ways to include those who feel excluded and abandoned in a new national story.
Cowley said the excluded were not the far right but the people of peripheral England for whom democratic politics is not working, “who don’t vote for Labour or any other party: the neglected, the ignored, the impoverished, the reviled, the mutinous. What do you do about these people and their anger, suffering and despair?”
Lessons for South Africa
Mbeki believes the same reality resonates strongly in South Africa for those who feel excluded and abandoned.
In the UK, 40% of voters boycotted the July 4 elections while in the South African context 60% had stayed away from the May elections.
“As in the UK, these are not right-wing people. However, they feel that democratic politics is not working for them. In many instances in the past, they did not vote for the ANC or any other party. They continue to belong among ‘the neglected, the ignored, the impoverished, the reviled, the mutinous’.”
He warned this might be used by “negative forces to incite a similar riotous rampage” in the country.
“Given the sordid response to the Miss South Africa candidacy of Miss Chidimma Adetshina, it could easily happen that such negative forces in our country could use Xenophobic-Afrophobia to engage in the moronic inferno to which Cowley referred.”
Should such a grouping arise, Mbeki warned that they would be encouraged because those “who take great pride in demanding ‘Mabahambe!'”, and others of their ilk, are now sitting in both parliament and government.