Over the past week various analyses have been presented for the vicious anti-immigrant mob violence which began in Alexandra Township on Sunday May 11 2008 and then spread out across the country. These pogroms have generally been explained - by critics of the ANC - as the unintended (but foreseeable) consequence of the accumulated effects of bad policy and poor governance.

The ANC leadership itself clearly did not want this violence, and it seems to have been genuinely shamed by it. Over the weekend ANC President Jacob Zuma delivered a speech where he described the perpetrators as "despicable" and said that there could be no "excuse for the brutal attacks on people and property." In his address to the nation President Thabo Mbeki described as "shocking" the "images of violence against people from other countries who live in our country, including cold-blooded acts of murder, brutal assault, looting and destruction of their property. Never since the birth of our democracy, have we witnessed such callousness."

There is obviously truth in all of this. But there is another factor which commentators have tended to overlook. The rulers of a country shape their societies not just through their rhetoric, or their policies, but also through the example they themselves set. In The Discourses Niccolò Machiavelli wrote, "Let not princes complain of the faults committed by the people subjected to their authority, for they result entirely from their own negligence or bad example. In examining the people who in our day have been given to brigandage and other vices of that kind, we see that these arise entirely from the faults of their rulers, who were guilty of similar abuses."

To illustrate this point he referred to the Italian state of Romagna - before Pope Alexander VI threw out the tyrants who ruled it. Rather like South Africa today that "country presented an example of all the worst crimes. The slightest causes gave rise to murder and every species of rapine*." Machiavelli argued that "this was due exclusively to the wickedness of the princes and not to the evil nature of the people, as alleged by the former."

These princes, Machiavelli said, "being poor, yet wishing to live in luxury like the rich, were obliged to resort to every kind of robbery." Among the dishonest means they would employ would be to make laws "prohibiting some one thing or another; and immediately after, they were themselves the first to encourage their non-observance, leaving such transgressions unpunished until a great number of persons had been guilty of it." Then, suddenly, "they turned to prosecute the transgressors; not from zeal for the law, but solely from cupidity, in the expectation of obtaining money from commuting the punishment."

"These infamous proceedings" Machiavelli observed, "caused many evils; the worst of them was that the people became impoverished without being corrected, and that then the stronger amongst them endeavoured to make good their losses by plundering the weaker."

The ANC owes its current position at least partly to the kind of callous mob violence we have witnessed over the past two weeks. Similar attacks directed against black functionaries of the South African state in the 1980s were, at the time, publicly condoned by the ANC. In a broadcast on Radio Freedom on December 17 1985 the ANC stated that the military attacks of "the freedom fighters of Umkhonto we Sizwe" were but "a continuation of petrol bomb attacks, the necklaces against the sell-outs and puppets in the townships..." On March 17 1986 the ANC boasted of how "With the usage of Molotov cocktails and necklaces, stones and knives, we have managed to drive the enemy to the extent where he has to impose a state of martial law."

After 1994 the ANC continued to insist the murder of innocents had been justified by the rightness of its cause. In 2003 Robert McBride - a man responsible for the deaths of at least five guiltless people - was deployed by the ANC to the position of Chief of Police in the Ekurhuleni Municipality. Mbeki defended this appointment saying "We will not agree that Mr McBride should be condemned for having been a liberation fighter."

After coming to power the ANC cornered for itself and its supporter's most key positions in state and parastatal institutions. Those of the wrong party or colour were driven out of state employment in their tens of thousands. Even after securing for itself the right to make the laws the ANC - under Mbeki's leadership -encouraged their non-observance.

Over the past decade we have seen a rotten arms deal adopted; the Land Bank bankrupted; parliament defrauded; state money diverted to fund the ANC's 2004 election campaign; and so on. Transgressors from within the ruling party have been subjected to investigation and prosecution only if they fell out with the (then) dominant faction. One former provincial MEC told Carol Paton that, after he had been fired on the president's instruction, "He [Mbeki] marshalled ever state institution he could he could to see whether I could be sent to jail, while he protected others who were close to him."

The new ANC seems to want to replace this policy of selectively prosecuting the members of the ruling elite, with one of blanket impunity. Parliament is, it seems, currently doing its best to stop creditors from getting their money back from senior politicians implicated in the Travelgate scandal. The ANC meanwhile is preparing to install someone facing serious corruption charges as South Africa's president; while busily trying to close down the Directorate of Special Operations - the one state institution that has shown a (growing) willingness to investigate and prosecute even our princes.

The ANC has not exactly encouraged, through its behaviour, a respect for the property of others either. Between 2000 and 2003 Zanu-PF set about the ‘looting and destruction' of the white commercial farming class in Zimbabwe. The Mugabe regime received the moral support of the ANC leadership for this effort to dismantle the ‘legacy of colonialism.' During one visit to Harare in October 2002 South Africa's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, told Zimbabwean television that however one went about it, "The real thing is that the issue is about the redistribution of land to the Zimbabwean people and that can't be wrong...It would be un-revolutionary to say it is wrong to give land."

There are numerous other examples one could present to illustrate how in South Africa the ‘faults of the people' have sprung, in one way or another, from ‘the faults of their rulers'. The point is that the personal conduct of a country's leaders sends a particular message to the population. Machiavelli concludes by saying that, whether for good or for ill, the people always imitate their rulers. He quotes Lorenzo de' Medici: "The example of the prince is followed by the masses, who keep their eyes always turned upon their chief."

* The OED defines rapine as "The act or practice of seizing and taking away by force the property of others; plunder, pillage, robbery."