Shoot to kill talk and lack of plans get same results
November 9, 2009
 By Quentin Wray
Julius Malema is a lucky guy. If the traffic cops who (allegedly) stopped him while he was (allegedly) speeding had followed the ANC's injunctions regarding shoot to kill, we would be reading his obituary, rather than his latest outrageous statements right now. Olga Kekana, as we all know, was not quite as lucky.
On October 11 she was shot and killed as a suspected hijacker. Her friends, Sophie Kgarake and Andrew Singo, were shot but they survived.
A young Atteridgeville man, Kgothatso Ndobe, who from all accounts was minding his own business, was killed by police on November 1.
We all want people to obey the law but unfortunately, in cases like this, the only law that gets obeyed is the law of unintended consequences.
And while we all welcome a new get-tough approach to crime, the fact that certain policemen and women have taken this to mean that they can do what they want is scary. It's all great until it's you on the wrong end of a cop's gun.
And no matter what ANC MP Angie Molebatsi said at Olga's funeral, getting shot by the very people charged with keeping you safe cannot be chalked up to "destiny". Molebatsi was right about one thing - we're all going to die one day - but to say that this means we shouldn't blame the police would, if it wasn't so crass, be funny.
This inability to foresee the consequences of policies that are, on the surface, sensible is something that plagues politicians around the world.
The prohibition of alcohol in the US in the 1920s, which was designed to curb crime, had a diametrically opposite effect as gangsters exploited people's thirst for booze.
The gang structures that were set up then survive today and now exploit demand for modern illicit substances.
The law of unintended consequences applies to economic, as well as social, interventions.
All the talk of nationalising the mines, expanding the age limit for the child grant and implementing a national health insurance scheme sounds great at first.
We live in the most unequal society on earth and these things, we are told, will help fix this and deliver us into a more equitable and caring society.
That is indeed a noble aim and one that is worthy of pursuit. Unfortunately the path prescribed by the Left is a well trodden one and history has shown us, repeatedly and in glorious technicolour, that the results of these policies differ greatly from their intended outcomes.
The National Planning Commission envisaged by ex-finance minister Trevor Manuel and, one assumes, the president in whose office he now sits, provides an ideal mechanism to break the linkages between noble aims, bad ideas and poor outcomes.
Whether or not Manuel will be allowed to pursue the fairly sensible goals espoused by his green paper for the planning commission remains to be seen.
But one thing we can be sure of is that unless there are people employed, by an organisation such as the mooted National Planning Commission, just to look at what can go wrong if policies are implemented, the inevitable knee-jerk reactions by politicians to the many economic and social malaises that we face will cause more harm than good.
If only there was a way to make politicians, chasing the next headline or by-election, understand that the long term is what counts if they want to make a real and appreciable difference to their constituents' lives.
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