NEWS
State failing it's duty to protect those it has used, Eastern Cape Herald, 16 March 2006

JACOB Zuma's rape trial is far from over. The complainant has however been subjected to verbal abuse for a long while already. It is clear that there is a lot of hostility towards her from Zuma's supporters. Presumably she was placed under the witness protection programme because the State feared that there was a risk of her being physically harmed.

She has given her testimony now and the high court will decide whether it believes her or not. In the light of her abuse by Zuma's supporters, the question was always going to be raised as to her personal safety after her testimony.

The SAPS washes its hands of her in the following words: "The police don't usually protect witnesses like this, so I don't think anyone knows what is going to happen. . ." A Cape Town advocate who is reported to have handled (for the State) a number of cases involving witnesses who had been placed under the witness protection programme has commented: "Usually the person is relocated and then released, the programme simply doesn't have the funds to keep protecting people who have served their purpose for the State".

Well, well. It seems to me that our law enforcement agents need a course on political theory. As I understand the matter, we existed before there was a state.

We called the state into existence so that it would fulfil certain responsibilities. One of these is to protect us.

So strong did political theorists of the past feel about this, they opined that a state that failed to protect its citizens negated its very raison d'etre and that, on that account, the citizens had the right and the responsibility to overthrow it.

In South Africa, however, the State has generally been so remiss in fulfilling this responsibility that its failure now appears to be the norm. It does not seem to be an issue any longer that the State is failing us in this regard.

We don't appear to expect any longer that the State will protect us. Therefore the very people who are entrusted with our safety are able to make statements such as the ones cited above. And they make them with complete impunity!

Lesson two: the people do not exist for the State. Quite the contrary, the State exists for the people!

We should therefore never tolerate the view that there are "people who have served their purpose for the State". Even less should we tolerate the signal that when the State has used us for its purposes, it is entitled to leave us to our own devices and to abandon us to the mercy of the people it "protected" us from before using us.

Such an attitude to human beings is intolerable and our responsibility is to create a social climate in which public servants are unable to say such things and get away with it.
Lesson three: the police are there for our protection whether or not we were used as witnesses in any trial whatsoever.
We understand only too well that it is physically and financially impossible to put a police officer behind each one of us in order to ensure our safety. That does not free the police from their duty.
If they fail, that should not be the result of them having made a conscious decision not to do their work because they think that it is not their work to protect us in any given set of circumstances. There is no set of circumstances strong enough to absolve the police from their duty.
The mere fact that it is necessary to place people under a protective programme in order to enable them to testify against alleged criminals is already a sad comment on the type of society we have become. We cannot make things much worse by making public statements to say that after we have used such people, they are on their own!
Often when we complain about the inefficacy of the criminal justice system in South Africa, we are told that the authorities alone cannot solve the problem and that citizens must come forward and not only report crimes, but testify when the alleged miscreants are caught. Which sane South African will be willing to come forward if he knows that he is on his own after the State has used him, that it will abandon him when he has served his purpose?

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