SECRETS ABOUT A STATE SECRETS BILL

There is a guy I met for the first time an hour ago.  He looks like a spook, full of state secrets. His name is Flesch-Kincaid (English).  Have you ever met him.  He first ordered me to throw all my first draft into a box before I revise my writing on a sensitive subject; and I did.  Then he told me the language I am using here can only be understood by a Grade 12 or higher.  Your ease of reading this first draft if 49%, meaning I am just average.  I am refusing revise what I wrote here. I just want you tell me how the flight of my imagination my little command of a greatest language strikes you.  It is an experiment at divulging Secrets of my State of mind. Who knows, you might give a clean Bill of health: the very Secrets about a State Secrets bill on which I have titled this blog post for primarily South African readership. Read with care, though, some words I might have used inapproriately, and so feel free to comment on inapropriate vocabulary as well as general diction. Thanks

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The Year closes in South Africa on  a highly quizzical and emotive note.  The bone of contention has been what is commonly but unofficially called a Secrets Bill that is as of this moment on the desk of President for signing into law.

But that is the problem with South Africa.  We bandy about a lot of words without understanding their meaning.  Worse, we go into heated debates about what we too often do not know about.

“Ha...ha... ha...!  This law is going to suppress the whistleblowers!”

In what way, you ask.

“I don’t know, but I have got a bad feeling about it; for why else is everybody wearing black this Tuesday in opposition to this piece of legislation?”

Have you read the legislation?

“No” comes the answer. “But those who are lawyers among us tell us it’s bad news indeed!  So, please let’s join and wear black.”

We get into all kinds of motions over something maybe only a tenth of us understand.  Personally I have not read anything concrete about the bill.

Do I get heebie-jeebies about it once it is South African law?

I don’t know about the jives. Usually I do not fear things I don’t have to know. What I know is that I am a law-abiding citizen; I live by my conscience and so far in my life the exhibition of my conscience has received nothing but praises.  I know laws are also made to be broken (as long as you can satisfy a judge that such breakage was intentional).  I know too that every law with its man and woman standing accused is also accusing itself, meaning: it gets tested and can one day be put a red cross over for that if it is found to be unconstitutional.

...”unconstitutional”...

There I go again using one of those nice terms bandied about!  Are we all of us newspaper leaders lawyers?

What is so problematic with journalists, particularly when there is a debate as has been with  the  Secrets Act to always preface it with a synopsis of What is a state? A democratic state? What is a “secret” where a state is concerned? What is a citizen? What is a government? Lawmaker? Constituent Assembly? Constitution? Constitutional Amendment? Corruption? Conscience?

Yes, there will be volumes and volumes in schools of thought as to what each term means.  Yes, newspapers are not there to be classrooms of such vast numbers of scientific disciplines necessary to debate those.  But that is exactly the problem of disparate understanding and even non-understanding of concepts as we go into these debates on bad or good laws.

Granted that these are each vast topics on their own. Each article, I propose, if printed about an intellectual issue like South Africa’s Secrets Bill, should be accompanied by that particular newspaper’s understanding, in a nutshell, about these issues.  This will enable never your readership to be suddenly masters pro or con the debated law; nor will it make them masters of the terminology that gives us the body politic of a country like South Africa. But, for sure your reader will emerge out of your tabloid’s presentation with an understanding of where you are coming from with your arguments pro and con.

It may well be that your paper’s presentation is Pro this law; only to find that its arguments are Con. This can never be seen by yourself or your readership if you did not take us privy to your understanding of the underlying terminology that constitute the state and its laws.

I am moving into this diatribe of mine with an understanding of a state being a piece of land populated by that creature with four legs but uses only two of which to walk when adult and the other two legs are reserved for all the wrongs and writes that will happen in that state, including the writing of a Secrets Bill.

The creature will not write that law if it lives alone; it will only write it in its own heart, making a contract with itself that I will never do this under these conditions and maybe do that under the following ones.  That damn heartfelt felting of laws of a one-man state is called THE CONSCIENCE of that individual.  His conscience is never right or wrong; but it is merely a contract between his mind and his emotions...with his mind being the eye that promise to lead him to a source of pleasure and satisfaction from such pleasure, and the emotion being a deeper feeling for the consequences where any for such act of self-satisfaction at the expense of his environment and his own body including the integrity of that body which, when ravaged, riven and savaged enough by each ma’s own choices results in cessation of life, which is commonly known as DEATH.  Clear, therefore, it should be: that this lonesome creature makes law and contracts with himself for one reason principally which is to get maximum pleasure from his environment while at the same time not getting pleasure too much for his own survival.

This lonesome creature is called a citizen of his own state.  He is also the president because he presides and takes action on his own affairs.  Another name for him is a lawmaker or loosely a member of parliament because he makes laws for himself.  This guy is also a politician because he debates options with his heart and influences his other hat, the hat as a lawmaker, to write particular laws for himself.  He is also a lawyer unto himself because, in the secrecy of the night after getting a bad wasp sting breaking a previous law of closely inspecting a fruit before assuming it is indeed whole fruit when it turns out to be a home of stingers, he may decide to annul the previous law and say my new law is will be never grab by hand any fruit while it is still up the tree.

He will never write the law that just because he got a sting, then he must write a new law never to eat fruit again since too frequently fruit morphs into hornets’ nest under his grasp.   Such a law would be UNCONSTITUTIONAL because the CONSTITUTION of his body was created in nature to use and need fruits.

While still grimacing from the pain of the sting, the guys is in a STATE of pain of course.  In fact, he is never outside of his State, because once he is out of the pain then he goes into the STATE of relief. Even as he made that blunder that saw a biological poison injected into his blood without his intentional invitation he was in some state, say a state of Bravado.  His State, though it changes all the time is his life.  And anyone who attacks his state, even if it is a bad state of stupidity like the aforementioned chutzpah (fortunately he lives alone but the wasps do keep company, and sometimes too much company for the integrity of his STATE) becomes an enemy of the state.  And that is why the wasp stung him was killed: there was a summary trial by lawyers, among whom was a judge (all in the split of a second) that sentenced the poor wasp to instant destruction. And so the state was preserved.

The state is not about lawyers and lawmakers or even politicians only.  There is a lot of other creepy crawly to constitute a state.  Let’s mention the doctors.  Our lonesome citizen is also a doctor when, among the herbs of his environment he can find a remedy for the sting.  Indeed he went to bed in a state of treatment!

Is this man also his own government? Yes of course, but he himself is not a government although every though of survival that crosses him mind, planning this course of action or another is the GOVERNMENT. Whenever he starts thinking differently  about something he thought was put to bed yesterday, it means his government is getting a lot of challenges (usually this is because the environment has changed for him, maybe there are more wasps around today than they were yesterday etc. etc.)

When one day our loner wakes up to change a whole gamut of thought processes maybe a decision that because of scarcity of food, I am not going to eat mushrooms only, but I am also going to eat those creatures that eat the mushrooms.  I am as of today leaning to hunt even on my knees so that I can see ants, millipedes and other pieces of my future food.  That kind of change is a change of his own GOVERNMENT.  He may be in a different state of feeling, but it is the same state that he had yesterday before eating centipedes.  His state is not like the state in the words: “Oh Ursula walked home in a state yesterday”

Rather it is in the context of “Oh Ursula walked home in a state of tears/mirth/famine etc yesterday”  In other words the STATE never changes, however bad it may be .  Your cannot give Ursula a dressing down for being the Ursula for being an Ursula who happened to cry yesterday; but you can give Ursula a dressing down for having cried yesterday.  Don’t beat the woman; beat the wrong act in her.

The distinction may be difficult when referred to a second person; but think about the day when this you made a stupid mistake (we return to the lonesome man), and you were so mortified as to slap your lap hard for it.

That, my dear reader, is the attack your made against the thoughts or oversight that led to your booboo.  It is an attack against the government of the day, and that is very much legitimate because you are giving yourself a slap intended to cement remedial thoughts not intended to destroy yourself.  People who make silly mistakes may bang the table, but they do not follow it up with self flagellation or even banging the wall as well with their heads.  The bottom-line in the banging process and severity is an understanding that here now I am making an indelible commitment in my mind never t o repeat that kind of mistake again.

Let us look at this one-man’s state in a different and very organic light now.

The head would of course be the HEAD of state like President Jacob Zuma in South Africa or King Mswati in the Kingdom of Swaziland.

This is where all the thinking happens to make South Africa or Swaziland stupid for a whole year in say 2011, and suddenly very smart and successful in 2011.  The Head does all the thinking for the rest of the body, but the head cannot live alone.  (Try to creep into your bedroom one night, leaving your head outside and see just impossible it is)

If anybody attacked your head with a hammer, you would shoot them immediately if you are armed and still able, that is, to think clearly after that attack.  It is an attack against the state!  If a lion tried to maul you in the head and you were a Samson you know what you would have done don’t you?

Are the cells that make up a human head of a different genetic code to the cells making up his toes, for example?  Not at all, for the Head (and even HEAD OF STATE) is nothing more than just a specialization of some cells to perform a certain function.  So if something comes to stab the head, is that an attack against the state.? It depends actually on the intention of the stabbing.  The man who stabbed Head of State Shaka Zulu to death for sure intended to kill him. But he had been stabbed hundreds of  times before with his own gratitude, where for example he had to be stabbed for a treatment of some ailment or stabbed for whatever pleasure he might have derived from such with the INTENTION other than killing the Head of state. All the hundreds of previous stabs that Shaka Zulu ever received outside of accident or battle, were no attacks against him although their effect on his tissues were of the same nature.

The issue against with this Shaka example is intention of the stabber.  The interesting part is it not necessarily for Shaka Zulu during the stabbing process to have decided there and there whether stab is well intended or not for at that particular stage of the stab, he may be delirious and unaware that a doctor needs puncture a boil on his head.  So usually, these things of intentions to murder  Shaka or to mend him are matters of fait-acompli under revision. That is why when you are going to treat somebody by painful means, you must be wary, they may be nasty repercussion for you as the doctor, and take precaution.

The last thing you are going to do, though as a doctor, is to resign yourself to seeing your patient die without any effort on your part.  “I cannot give this mad man an injection to stop him from injuring himself to death...look at his big arms, he’s sure going to break my nose with one punch as I inject him”.  In fact, if you do nothing, you have in fact lost your love for your calling as a life-saving doctor.

My examples of my understanding of how a state functions are maybe too simplistic because they postulate the existence of all human disciplines as if they are found in every single one of us 50 million or so South African.  Real life of the state is a bit far more complicated than that Mr Phiri, you say.

How so, I ask?  Isn’t it only true that when you talk about the government of South Africa or of the Kingdom of Swaziland where you are a subject of the king, that government in your reference is primarily yourself?

Am I subsuming patriotism in every citizen?

Yes I do; and I insist we must view one another as patriotic citizens until such time as an individual proves himself otherwise.

I am still to meet someone at my workplace or someone around my neighbours who is unpatriotic.  These are very scarce people to find. This is because the only you seem to be able to see signs of non-patriotism is where an individual is entrusted with enormous power over others. That person starts looking around for particular persons to whom he can dispense his enormous powers rather than to others.  His motives I want to deal with them another day, but you will understand that that these people are mostly found in higher government; and their first sign of their unfair discrimination against other citizens will be red tape, the run-around, and waiting you as a citizen will do before you get an answer from your president, cabinet ministers and these other more junior fellow who, in a corrupt government tend to be employed to the last man and woman, yes-men of the big boss.

This is a kind of government that we must never accept in South Africa; and if it exists now. We should attack it yesterday and not wait to attack a law, maybe State Secrets Act that may kick in next week next month or next season (depending on President Zuma’s moods of course).

What I have tried to say is that we should not be vague with our expression of displeasure over proposals in a state like hours.  We should b specific and consistent. I believe if the new law has evil inspirations and intentions fuelling it, which it may or may not be.  We as 50 million other patriotic citizens are to blame for it. We have not been engaging government enough for the past 10 to 20 years, sacrificing enough in our demands for accountability. We left whistle blowing to only a few angels who must do it for us as they do not feel pain and suffering of victimization when they are dragged left and right to courts for blowing the whistle or even get killed for their trouble of cleaning up the state.  Let me be provocative and enough to ask: how many of us comfy citizens have spared ourselves a serious thought to ask: How is the mother of South African martyr Solomon Mahlangu doing these days?  Is she still alive that woman?  Is there anything that I (forget about government and the face of Zuma) can also do for someone who is probably quite an elderly lady today if still alive?

If the new law is evil, and I hope not, as I have as of this writing not formed ideas hither or thither over it... I am still reading comments and looking at my own situation and experience.  But if indeed it is evil, I think it will serve South Africa damn good. For the first time everybody comfortable and uncomfortable will share the discomfort.

Even if you lock the tumultuous world out of your house and far from your yard, the unrest that will come with the nationwide struggle with those in power, will break your fence, fell your door and eat you up.

It is best for a South African to jump up with spear against a man eating lion last year and last decade while it was attacking your neighbour and kill it there.  If, out of fear, you shut your doors and your ears to the  sounds of the neighbourly cries and the crunching of bones and munching of human flesh under leonine mastication, do not blame the man-eater for developing new ways of getting into your yard.

He has now an even more zestful and quaint appetite for your flesh, acquired from eating your neighbour last year!