Breaking rules is a truly nonracial South African activity

It is a favourite South African pastime to blame somebody else for the sorry state of the country: the government, the ANC, the Guptas, the tenderpreneurs, the municipality, the rich, the poor, white people, black people … But perhaps we get what we deserve. Perhaps we have neglected to look critically at ourselves. 

To illustrate my point, here is a small example. At my local supermarket there is a parking place reserved for people with disabilities. It is clearly marked with yellow criss-cross lines on the paving, and a conspicuous blue sign indicating its purpose. This purpose is however widely disregarded. More than half the time, in my observation, people who stop there have no manner of disability at all, and simply use it as the most convenient place to park.  These able-bodied people who park in the disabled bay represent as diverse a cross-section of South Africans as you could hope to find: young and old, male and female, rich and poor, black and white.  

On the other side of that same parking lot is an entrance that comes in off the main road through a narrow one-way street, clearly marked at the main road end with a one-way sign and at the supermarket end with two large “No entry” signs. Instead of taking the legitimate but longer exit route out of the parking area, many cars use that little street as a convenient exit, going against the one-way traffic by squeezing past the incoming cars. Again, the drivers are a truly representative cross-section of the population. 

The same phenomenon can be observed over and over again. Vehicles without number plates, for example, span the spectrum from beat-up bakkies to posh SUVs (although to be fair it must be said that there are proportionately more rich and shiny vehicles without number plates than beat-up ones). The same representativeness can be seen in people talking on the phone while driving, or passing against a double white line, or stopping on a red line. The transgressors form a fair sample of our South African population, in all its variety. 

Those who disregard the rules often manifest a shared belief that other people ought to accommodate their transgressions. They seemingly share, for example, a view that turning on their hazard lights immediately suspends all rules of the road. Instead of restricting the use of their hazard lights to an occasional “Be careful, there’s a hazard”, many people turn them on just to say “Excuse me, I have just stopped right here in the middle of the road for my own convenience, and I am sure everybody else behind me won’t mind waiting while I finish my business”. Behind this common behaviour lies a common assumption: that the courtesy of informing others of your intention to inconvenience them entirely cancels out the discourtesy of causing the inconvenience. 

This assumption easily grows into a stronger belief: that my individual choice to disregard any general rule for my own convenience is a matter of right. Such is the belief of the driver who overtakes against a double white line, on a blind corner. Should there be a car coming from the front, that oncoming car must then of necessity pull over into the shoulder on their left, beyond the yellow line, to avoid a head-on collision. Many overtakers simply assume as a matter of right that because the car coming from in front can accommodate them, they must. 

My general point is that how a nation drives is how a nation lives. There are very few signs of anybody bothering about able-bodied people parking in the disabled bay, or driving without a number plate, or stopping on a red line — and even fewer signs of such small transgressions being addressed. 

But when rule-breaking goes unchallenged, it grows. It grows, first, from small rules being broken to large rules being broken, and second, from rule-breaking being the exception to being the rule.

What you see on the road is only one example of a common way of thinking and a common way of behaving, namely that following the rules is a matter of choice, and whatever you can get away with is legitimate. On a larger scale, think of our national cancer of corruption. Corruption is essentially a collaborative activity. An individual may lie, or cheat, or steal, but corruption requires a network. When sufficiently many people are sufficiently habituated to breaking small rules on an individual basis, they are ripe to form networks of breaking large rules together. The tenderpreneur associated with your local municipality, for example, requires somebody on the inside to write the tender specification in a certain way, somebody on the procurement committee to ignore vastly-inflated prices, somebody in management to authorise payment or “commission”, nobody to worry about conflict of interest, and everybody to ignore non-delivery. 

Is there any crumb of comfort in all of this? I think there is. Rule-breaking provides a good example of nonracialism.  

Nonracialism is a founding principle of post-1994 South Africa. It says that in any activity of our national life the colour of your skin ought to matter as little as the size of your shoes. We have not been hugely successful in attaining this ideal over the past 30 years, and examples of truly nonsegregated, nonracial sectors of society are not easy to find. But here we have an example that provides, so to speak, an existential proof of the possibility of nonracialism. It is simply this: when it comes to breaking rules, small or large, there is no discernible racial profile of the perpetrators. As rule-breakers, we are truly nonracial. 

Chris Brink is emeritus vice-chancellor of Newcastle University in England, and former rector and vice-chancellor of Stellenbosch University.