SAFE SPACES SHRINKING

The killing of an Asian businessman this week at Buka, which was captured on CCTV from which a video clip was circulated, provoked a reaction that has been missing from our once highly empathetic society. It was a vivid display of an abhorrence of crime such as this senseless killing, which occurred at a time when the act of murder seems to be garnering a heroic status.

While reading through the reactions, one got to understand that a number of emaSwati appreciate the fact that the country is faced with a number of social ills such as high unemployment, drug abuse and poverty, among others, but that none of these should warrant taking the life of another human being just to get a quick nicotine fix or to get by. This ‘one voice against a senseless killing’ also presented a worrying side to it. It emerged shortly after the killing of five suspected armed robbers during a high speed car chase with security forces.

This was a vote of confidence on what yesterday would have been referred to as excessive use of force or police brutality. We are not privy to what actually happened when security forces chased and apprehended the eight suspected armed robbers. Postmortem reports reveal that three of the deceased had gunshot wounds in the head. At the face of it, it would appear that there is a crackdown on crime and the rising acts of arson and politically motivated assassinations.

The praise was more of an encouragement towards the security forces to restore law and order. Some are asking how else could it be done when the instigators are armed and dangerous? This is the dilemma facing a society beset with a myriad of challenges that has degraded the meaning of life in this country, such as gender-based violence, which has been steadily competing with general crime on the murder stage, with the figures have shown no signs of abating.

Killing

Now we have calls for political change entering the killing spree and shrinking the safe spaces in which we once roamed freely without a care in the world. Gender activists are counting the loss of lives in more or less the same measure as are relatives of security forces and the general citizenry.
In the process, the profile of doing business in Eswatini has taken a huge knock and the timing could not have been worse. The high unemployment needs the industries we are scaring away. The fix-it list for our government just keeps getting longer and longer.

The oxymoron in our situation is that in order to find solutions to the challenges we face, we have got to come together and talk. However, the violence is now the biggest stumbling block to our progress. Government wants the violence to stop before we can talk. Therein lies the frustration of many emaSwati as we look to 2023 with great uncertainty. The longer we take to confront the issues together, the more dangerous it becomes to live in the kingdom. We don’t want that – especially when we can change it.

Fear

The condemnation of the Asian businessman’s killing gave one a sense that there are many emaSwati living in perpetual fear of the crime that has taken hold and they now want their lives back. The body count is one too many if we are to count back from the June 29 killings and there seems no end in sight. The proliferation of guns in our midst has heightened the security threat, with car hijackings and armed robberies becoming a common feature. What does tomorrow have is store for us? This is the question many of us ask ourselves these days when we wake up to a murder, be it politically motivated, a robbery or even a crime of passion. One might never know what drove the suspected killer to lunge a knife into the businessman’s body, but it doesn’t change the fact that he is a product of the society we now live in and there could be many more like him out there. If we do not resolve these societal ills at political and community level soon, all we can ask is; whose next?

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