Browsing by Author "Steytler, Nicolaas"
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Item South Africa(University of Toronto Press, 2019) Steytler, Nico; Steytler, Nicolaas; Muntingh, LukasSouth Africa is facing a major public safety crisis threatening its constitutional democracy. Personal violent crime (murder, rape and robbery) remains among the highest in the world; conuption in the public service is rife; public protests about poor service delivery are frequent (Powell, O'Donovan, and De Visser 2015), widespread, and often tum violent; xenophobic attacks occur frequently (South African History Online 2015); and industrial strike action has also resulted in violence. Devastating natural disasters have, fortunately, been infrequent. The state institutions concerned with public safety and corruption are located mainly at the national level, but perform poorly to meet these diverse challenges. Moreover, the national government's response to crime has focused almost exclusively on law enforcement, neglecting primary, secondary and tertiary crime prevention of a socio-economic nature. The South African Police Service (SAPS), despite its size (nearly 194,000) (SAPS 2015, 309), has been demoralized by corruption from the top to the bottom, it has been politicized, and its public order policing is ill-equipped and inadequately trained to deal with frequent public disturbances. The National Prosecuting Autholity (NPA), too, has been politicized, and its success rate is declining (Redpath 2012). The national court system has run up huge backlogs in trying cases and the national Department of Correctional Services does little more than warehousing a large and growing prison population of some 42,000 people awaiting trial. Sentenced prisoners seldom receive the necessary services to reduce the risk of re-offending after release.Item The withering away of politically salient territorial cleavages in South Africa and the emergence of watermark ethnic Federalism(Oxford University Press, 2019) Steytler, Nico; Steytler, NicolaasThe policy of apartheid was an attempt to territorialize the white/black racial cleavage through the creation of bantustans, confining black political aspirations to 13 percent of the country, while the remainder of the country continued under white minority dominance. This was to be done by fracturing blacks into ethnic-based territories. The failure of, and resistance to, apartheid resulted in the "constitutional moment" from 1990 to 1996 where the two major protagonists, the white minority, represented by the National Party (NP) and the African National Congress (ANC) sought to make the political salience of these manufactured territorial cleavages; they created a new narrative of a non-racial, non-ethnicity society and thereby undercut the salience of territory. This project was violently resisted by polities whose very political base lay in territory- the Afrikaner right wing and Zulu nationalises. However, the non-racial, non-ethnic narrative was dominant, although allowances were made for very limited accommodation of ethnic-based territories. After twenty-five years the unmaking of the salience of territorial cleavages has largely been successful; territorial policies based on race and ethnicity have largely withered away. Right-wing Afrikaners and Zulu nationalises' demands for an ethnic homeland have evaporated. Although ethnicity amongst the Africans has not disappeared, it is currently well catered for through a weak federal system. The non-territorial black/ white divide, manifested by the continued inequality in wealth between the two racial groups, is still the dominant cleavage, which has led to the increasing questioning of title non-territorial comprise between the ANC and the NP over the protection of property rights.