My brother and colleague, Tshepo Mokoka, penned a provocative and necessary article which he titled, “Second Chance or Second Betrayal”. The article was published on one of the local online platforms called Insider Chronicle.
The article asks the kind of question that unsettles the comfortable and confronts the sentimental. It is sharp. It is emotionally honest. It reflects a real fear in our communities that trusting someone who once violated their trust might invite further harm.
And yet, precisely because I respect him, I must disagree.
The article gives us a memorable line that “we ought to be wary of the man who burned down a house, demanding we trust him with matches.” It is poetic. It lands emotionally. But unfortunately, poetry is not policy. And emotions, however understandable and justified, cannot trump our constitution.
Here is the question we must rather ask: if the man burned down the house and the court sentenced him, he served that sentence in full and suffered the long cooling-off period after serving it; what then?
Fortunately, the Constitution of South Africa does not believe in permanent exile. It does not create a caste of the eternally condemned. Section 10 guarantees human dignity. Not selective dignity. Not dignity for the unblemished. Human dignity.
Section 12 guarantees the right to freedom and security of the person. Section 22 affirms the freedom to choose a trade, occupation or profession. These clauses are not meant for decorative purposes. They are a statement of national intent that punishment has limits. If prison is not the limit, then what is? Social death?
The article fears a “second betrayal.” I understand and agree with that fear. Communities ravaged by crime cannot afford to be naive. But we must also be careful not to commit another betrayal; the betrayal of our constitutional promise.
We are not being cautious when we say to an ex-offender that “you have served your time, but you will never work here. You will never live here. You will never belong here”. We are simply being contradictory, populist and dangerously scandalous.
We demand rehabilitation in theory and sabotage it in practice. If you deny a person lawful means of survival, you are not preventing crime. You are incubating it. A man who cannot access work, housing or community will irk out a living where he can. Survival does not wait for moral approval. Then we will gather at conferences and lament recidivism, as though it descended from the heavens.
The Constitution progressively imagines something braver than suspicion. It imagines restoration. It imagines that once a debt is paid, the slate is cleared in law even if memory lingers in emotion. We cannot run a democracy on perpetual vengeance, the madness of serving a sentence until Jesus comes back. That road leads to a society of permanent outcasts and outcasts are not stable citizens. They are people with nothing to lose.
Reintegration is not softness. It is self-preservation. It is saying that we will not create a subclass of the inherently unwanted. It is saying we will not undermine our own constitutional values simply because we are afraid.
My brother Mokoka raises the alarm about matches. I raise the alarm about the slow-burning and unending fire of permanent retribution. I have also just come across another article that brands Mr Zumane as a “convicted fraudster,” as if he must permanently be chained to his lowest moment. See, we even refuse to recognise him as an ex-offender seeking reintegration. Such lexicon is casually discarded in favour of labels that deny him redemption and humanity. If we deny ex-offenders lawful lives, we should not be surprised when unlawful ones return to haunt us.
The Constitution gave us a path out of that cycle. The question is whether we are brave enough to walk it or we choose the easy path of pandering to a populist pulse.
*Tshediso Mangope moonlights as a social commentator in his spare time and writes in his own personal capacity…
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of this publication (Journal News).
