The widely recognised and critical link between human security and national security is sadly relegated to peripheral general recommendations in the “Report of the Expert Panel into the July 2021 Civil Unrest”.
“Holding those responsible for the violence accountable, and strengthening the capabilities of the security services” seems to be the number one priority.
In keeping with the panel’s terms of reference (ToR), the report's raison d'être is to review the security force’s preparedness and shortcomings in responding to the unrest.
Without doubt, the mitigation of any threat to national security is important. But a strategy that does not take into account the fundamental role that poverty-induced human insecurity plays, will remain a band-aid approach that does not address the dire conditions that provide an enabling socioeconomic environment for widespread civil unrest to spread like wildfire.
The report ignored a glaring fact that the human security of the majority of people living in SA is key to a national security strategy that will prevent the recurrence of the type of civil unrest seen in July 2021.
The failure to link the two in the official inquiry into the government’s response to the looting, and the subsequent deaths and destruction of the economy, raises questions whether the recommendations will be effective in minimising civil unrest in the future.
At another level, a government policy that tends to attribute risk to further civil unrest primarily on the lack of security capacity, will most likely antagonise poor communities as the number one enemy of the state. Findings into how security forces can respond with more precision to civil unrest would inadvertently reinforce a view in the police “force” that indigent communities are indeed a nest of civil disobedience.
The lack of opportunities and development, especially for the youth, whose unemployment rate is unacceptably high, will continue at our own peril.
The panel’s ToR missed a crucial opportunity to fully appreciate the human security-national security nexus, despite a well-documented history that can be traced to the early 1990s.
The 1994 Human Development Report defined human security as people's "safety from chronic threats and protection from sudden hurtful disruptions in the patterns of daily life". In Walter Dorn’s paper, “Human Security: An Overview”, seven types of security were listed as components of human security: economic; food; health; environmental; personal (physical); community; and political.
A comprehensive approach to national security that incorporates human rights and security will ensure durable and lasting peace and order, especially in light of the socioeconomic challenges facing SA, the Southern African region and the entire global south.
In a month to remember the Sharpeville Massacre, South Africans should be commemorating that human rights cannot be realised without the human security of each citizen. Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms that "everyone has the right to life, liberty and the security of person".
The concept of human security is a people-centred approach that embraces both the dichotomies of individuality and universality, of indivisibility and personal freedom, of individual rights and collective rights.
The risk for more civil upheaval exists because a balance point has not been reached, one which must take into account both the authority of the state and the freedom of the individual, as evidenced by ongoing service delivery protests, the proliferation of operation Dudula in Gauteng, and the 2008 Human Rights Commission report on xenophobia that has not been implemented.
In retrospect, broader ToR would have allowed for more analysis on how persistently low economic growth, high levels of unemployment and poverty undermine human security to the extent of becoming a real threat to national security.
Strengthening and building up sufficient state security on its own will not be enough to mitigate against the type of unrest that rogue elements in our society will cynically exploit because of persistently low economic growth, and the associated high levels of poverty, unemployment and inequality.
• Sitshange is an independent consultant (MA: Industrial Social Work, Wits University)
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