HEIDI HOLLAND

Our ineffective government needs something to blame for all its shortcomings, especially corruption

We must beware in this country of scapegoating politics. While rife everwhere in the world, the age-old process of shifting blame and displacing aggression is becoming more noticeable in South Africa as the country's economy and bureaucratic capacity fail to expand fast enough to alleviate the poverty of the majority of our population. With the ANC's promises for the post-apartheid project sounding increasingly hollow, the gap between aspirations and reality is breeding social discontent – and scapegoating.

A favourite trick of social engineering since biblical times, scapegoating as a word came into use when the chief priest of the Jews took two goats, sacrificed one of them, then loaded the other with the sins of the Israelites and drove the burdened animal into the desert. Scapegoating has long featured in witch beliefs as a means of punishing often eccentric and sometimes mentally-ill individuals for the dark deeds of others, or of enabling struggling people to rationalize misfortune and illness.

In politics, especially when things start to go wrong, scapegoating diverts attention away from those who are really to blame for the accumulating social problems. Examples of political scapegoating in our midst include the renewed scope for violent xenophobic pogroms, particularly against Somali shopkeepers in Cape Town, East London and Johannesburg; ongoing attacks by the government on the constitutionally-guaranteed freedom of the media; and a fascinating attempt by the ruling party to blame Julius Malema for its poor showing during recent municipal elections.

Xenophobia is one of the most obvious sites of scapegoating. During the current period of economic recession with high unemployment and a pervasive sense of the nation heading in the wrong direction, many South Africans are experiencing a growing sense of powerlessness. Their resultant anger is periodically released by scapegoating those whom the state has stigmatized as "illegal immigrants".

A recent Human Rights Watch report noted the open police victimization of migrants in this country and concluded: "In general, South Africa's public culture has become increasingly xenophobic, and politicians often make unsubstantiated and inflammatory statements that the "deluge" of migrants is responsible for the current crime wave, rising unemployment and even the spread of diseases." Is it any wonder in such a climate of fear and loathing that, through scapegoating, hard-pressed South Africans achieve the illusion that they are reclaiming control over their own lives by focusing their animus on a clearly defined enemy such as "foreigners" in historically violent South Africa?

Our generally ineffective government, meanwhile, needs scapegoats to blame for all its other shortcomings, especially corruption by national and local state personnel, who are seldom prosecuted.

What to do when theft from the public purse becomes so persistent that it begins to devour the president's political capital? Why, blame journalists, of course.

Jacob Zuma - himself the subject of extensive corruption allegations and therefore angry, frustrated and prejudiced towards journalists - has lately authorized attacks against the media via the misnamed Protection of Information Act and a punitive tribunal that together aim to stop investigative journalism and whistleblowing. By scapegoating the media as ill-informed and arrogant, the government is intent not only on curtailing freedom of information in order to facilitate unquestioned corruption and impunity in the future but, more immediately, on sowing doubt about today's rampant self-enrichment of many of its officials.

At another level of scapegoating, playing the race card as an excuse for various failures has been common practice for some time in our government. Lately ratcheted up by Julius Malema with his crude claims to poor voters that all whites are criminals who stole the country's resources (an accusation made on a platform he shared with President Zuma, mind you) such racist scapegoating may be reminiscent of our former oppressor's demonization of the ANC as communist conspirators, but it is nevertheless deeply dangerous. While yesterday it was left-wing agitation rather than the Nationalist Party's politics of white supremacy that threatened our society, today's distraction by scapegoat is the capitalist greed of whites rather than ANC incompetence and resource-grabbing.

Neighbouring Zimbabwe's disastrous use of such demonizing politics is a warning we ignore at our peril. Rabble-rousing Malema reminds me of Robert Mugabe's populist outlier Chenjerai "Hitler" Hunzvi, who came to prominence in the late Nineties when Mugabe was beginning to lose his legitimate hold on power (as Zuma is doing right now). Demanding nationalization, like Malema, Hunsvi was a loose cannon who could be disowned in public but whose urgent call for radical reform initially positioned the government at the centre of the political spectrum without it having to lead the undiplomatic charge against whites in a black-run country with a white-run economy. Like Malema, Hunsvi gained increasing popularity among the country's socially discontented masses for "telling the truth", as the scapegoating of whites became known.

In subsequent years, Mugabe scapegoated imperialism and the British to enormous advantage propaganda-wise.They were to blame for every social ill and frustration. Pragmatically regarding Zimbabwe's dwindling white population as "settlers" left over from the colonial era, he cleverly scapegoated a major European power, rather than a handful of local whites, as the ongoing threat to his nation.

That Malema was recently blamed for the ANC's loss of municipal election votes shows how versatile a political tool he is to the ANC. His acolytes were quick to cry foul on the grounds of scapegoating, though. The unhealthy tendency to unfairly blame others was also directed against Thabo Mbeki when he was driven from office by Zuma's supporters: everything that was wrong in South Africa suddenly became his fault.

If left unchecked in our historically racist culture, scapegoating might escalate to what analyst Hein Marais calls "rousing affirmations of identity and entitlement". A populist nationalism that starts asking questions like "Who is a real South African?" may begin to target those who don't qualify, which, as Zimbabwe has shown, will not do our post-apartheid project any good at all.