The dramatic and immensely embarrassing story of Thabo Bester and Dr Nandipha Magudumana is hard to ignore.
It is an international embarrassment for both the department of correctional services and the nation.
SA has experienced so many moments of shock, anger and disillusionment associated with out-of-control crime.
This suite of emotions is so common that it has become unbearable.
The countless incidents of crime and corruption which have projected SA as a corruption capital of the world have taken a heavy toll on our national psyche.
Perhaps as a coping mechanism, South Africans often switch back and forth from numbness to shock.
Yet we cannot afford to resign ourselves to the place we have collectively allowed the ruling party to lead us. We must remove ourselves from here.
The revelation that it was former Constitutional Court judge Edwin Cameron who was behind the media leak about Bester’s escape presents a flicker of hope.
Though the country has been hanging by a thread for a long time, the fight against corruption and the associated collapse is raging on.
Due to the high profile of the former Concourt judge, who is now an inspecting judge for the Judicial Inspectorate for Correctional Services (Jics), this matter got the attention of the justice minister, Ronald Lamola.
This was also after Cameron had reached out to the regional correctional services commissioner without success.
What Cameron did was admirable. It confirms that when people do their jobs, our state machinery comes through.
Though the judge insists he only supplied publicly available information to the GroundUp team which broke the story, his actions attracted the required public attention to Bester’s escape.
This also indicates that when prominent South Africans in positions of influence act on behalf of the nation, the fight against degeneration and corruption gains ground.
The challenge to all South Africans is to use their influence to join the fight against corruption.
Interestingly, when the state machinery failed, as it often does, the judge identified the media as a partner to expose the Bester story.
According to the judge, the slow pace of the investigation, which is often a sign of lack of political will, is what led him to contact the media.
The media has been consistent in exposing corruption and playing a critical role in the fight against crime and corruption.
If the conflicted approach of the ruling party’s fight against corruption is anything to go by, the media will remain central in the fight against crime and corruption.
Home affairs minister Aaron Motsoaledi was at pains to explain how Bester had no official identity documents.
The home affairs department was fingered many times in the past for harbouring corrupt officers that make identity document and passport related fraud a worldwide concern.
However, perhaps a more immediate problem is the number of undocumented people in our country.
The potential of this problem to feed into other problems, particularly crime, is very high. It is obviously harder to trace undocumented people, and thus harder to investigate their criminal activities.
Unfortunately, it is not clear just how big a problem this is in SA.
According to a 2020 South African Human Rights Commission report, it is estimated that upwards of 15 million people are undocumented in SA. That is an unacceptably high number by any measure.
If we consider the implications of the high number of undocumented people in the light of out-of-control crime rates and inadequate prosecutions, the implications are serious.
The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime released a report in 2018 in which it reported that the taxi mafia in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng were implicated in recruiting young men from deep rural KwaZulu-Natal.
These young men, preferably undocumented, are recruited to feed the taxi Mafia’s growing demand for contract killers.
This makes Cameron’s contribution all the more important.
SA requires urgent action from all citizens.
Saving the nation requires attracting attention to all the glaring breaches of law as well as the corruption which often accompanies these activities.
The risk of exposing corruption is often far less for prominent people than it is for the ordinary citizen.
For the ordinary citizen, exposure to harm for exposing corruption is elevated.
At the same time, some of the common means to deal with criminality are often criminal.
This is why desperate communities often resort to rounding up and murdering suspected criminals, though we don’t encourage such acts.
In this environment, it is no longer feasible for prominent South Africans to merely discuss these shortcomings in the privacy of their living rooms.
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