THE ILLUSION OF ELITISM-SEKWELE

By Lethabo Sekwele
Activist

Many of us remember the riveting images that emerged from South Korea on 3 December 2024, when the disgraced former president Yoon Suk Yeol stepped onto the podium and declared martial law.

The suspense, intrigue, and sheer magnitude of that moment reverberated across the world, even reaching us here at the southernmost tip of Africa.

The world watched as a small but democratically advanced Asian nation found its streets flooded with soldiers and law enforcement officers, not to protect the people, but to enforce the will of one tyrannical man.

South Korea’s dark history made this moment even more momentous.

From 1961 to 1979, martial law had been the tool of authoritarian leaders used to crush dissent, stifle the press, and exert and maintain power through fear.

But the people remembered.

They remembered the bloodshed, the disappearances, the generational trauma of state repression.

Stories carried transferred to them by their elders and a deliberate and reinforced education system built to ensure the nation never forgets.

That collective understanding of “Never
again,” jolted lawmakers from their beds and drove them to the National Assembly in defiance of the President’s proclamation.

We saw soldiers deployed in riot gear against their own citizens, armed to the teeth and poised to uphold the will of the Executive.

And then, in an extraordinary moment of moral clarity, we saw those same soldiers refuse.

Videos circulated of soldiers allowing lawmakers to climb the fences of the National Assembly, vandalise the building to gain access and soldiers deliberately delaying enforcement orders.

We saw men in uniform choosing the Constitution over command, the will of the nation over the Number One Citizen, their best interests over the ambitions of the few.

Through their quiet defiance, the people reclaimed their democracy from the brink of collapse.

South Africans, however, receive no such camaraderie from their law enforcement.
In a country that ranks as the most unequal on earth, with youth unemployment soaring, genderbased violence and femicide rivaling war-zone levels, kleptocracy entrenched, poverty spreading, and the economy in freefall, our security forces too often stand not with the people, but between them and justice.

Too often, when citizens seek to mobilize, to protest, to reclaim even a fragment of control over the conditions of their lives, the police and military position themselves as enemies of progress.

It is as though they are not us, do not live among us, raise families beside us, or suffer under the same governance failures.

The term “Executive branch” seems to have been internalized to mean elite fraternity.

Many within it behave as though they too are beneficiaries of the very corruption
and inequality that oppresses them.
“Orders are orders.”

“The Presidency says.”

“We have to maintain law and order.”
“We will arrest you.”

This is the rhetoric espoused to every activist at some point in their lives who has dared to exercise their constitutional right to assemble, to march, to demand better.

Yet the oath of service is clear.
Members of the SANDF pledge “to serve and defend the Republic and its people in accordance with the Constitution.”

SAPS officials swear “uphold and protect the fundamental rights of every
person.”

So what is a law enforcer to do when orders contradict their oaths?

When the command to suppress the people is the very betrayal of the Constitution they swore to uphold?

When law enforcement obedience becomes the spine that keeps a kleptocratic, gerontocratic and inept state upright?

South African need not look far for answers.

In August 2012, harrowing videos of forty-four unarmed and desperate mineworkers pleading for a living wage were hunted and eviscerated with automatic rifles by so called “Protectors of the citizens” who allowed themselves to act as hired guns for corporate and political power.

Collins Khosa met his end when he was beaten to death in his own yard by SANDF members deployed “To protect citizens” during the COVID-19 pandemic South Africans know all too well that reminded that uniforms detached from conscience, become harbingers of oppression.

Even today, we see protesters demanding service delivery in townships dispersed with rubber bullets, and teargas yet motorcades glide freely through the same streets without consequence and protection from the same law enforcers.

South Africa is still young.

Many of our citizens, and many in the security brass, lived more years
under apartheid than under democracy.

One would think that memory would serve as a warning: that they would recall how uniforms once became symbols of fear, how authority once meant oppression.

That they would recognize, the same language of “control,” “compliance,” and “order” was used to justify brutality.

Yet, too often, they do not.

Instead, we find officers and soldiers standing guard not over the people, but over the interests of the powerful.

We find them barricading streets against citizens rather than standing beside them in defense of truth and the wellbeing of the nation.

The illusion of elitism blinds them.

This belief that by enforcing the will of the Executive, they are somehow part of its privilege or exempt from its part of destruction.

But history, both Korean and South African, proves otherwise.

When Nations collapse, the illusion fades. And when that reckoning comes, those who opted for public integrity over private obedience as the South
Koreans did, will be remembered fondly by history.

Those who chose the latter, will be left behind.