Were the police right to escort Julius Malema away from Marikana?
There have been enough knee-jerk and politically motivated reactions to the question. Before we answer with a confident Yes or No, it is worth seeing that it hides many difficult and more important questions, if we care to think about them. Here is one.
How can Julius Malema's ‘right of free speech' (or, for that matter, anybody's right - Mr Malema is merely the person most anxious to advertise his individual rights at the moment) - how can Mr Malema's ‘right of free speech' be the sole issue or priority here?
There are, besides, the issues of innocent people's safety and lives and public order. All practical issues, all moral issues. What about them? Where do they come in?
As you would expect, Mr Malema maintains they have nothing to do with him and what he said to the striking miners. He did not encourage the carrying of weapons: the miners themselves decided to do that. He is not threatening the peace; he is not condoning violence. He is talking a fair wage, economic rights, equality. It is a hard line to refute, hard to break down his tone of ardent and outraged innocence. It sounds plausible. Distinguished experts have hastened to back Mr Malema up, pronouncing in the press and on TV that, in the eyes of the law, he is not guilty of this or that or the other. Not guilty of anything.
Except that everyone knows none of that is the point. Populists do not rush to the market place, or the veldt, calling for murder and mayhem in plain breach of the law. Like Mark Antony rousing the citizens of Rome to mutiny and civil war in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, they know they have to be more subtle than that: