The brutal killing of three Mozambican men in South Africa, allegedly by a vigilante group calling itself the ‘Maputo Syndicate’, has thrust the Commonwealth’s policing standards into the spotlight. But let’s not pretend this is an isolated incident. This is the logical conclusion of a society that has abandoned the rule of law for the rule of the mob, a pattern we have seen before in the dying days of the Roman Republic.
The South African Police Service, already buckling under the weight of incompetence and corruption, has proven itself utterly incapable of protecting even those within its borders, let alone vulnerable migrants. And what of the Commonwealth, that grand imperial relic? Its vaunted ‘standards’ are a farce.
When the mother of parliaments cannot police its own streets in London without a knife-crime epidemic, what hope for its colonial offshoots? The question is not whether South Africa can investigate this killing, but whether it wants to. The answer, I suspect, lies in the same cesspool of political cowardice and moral rot that has turned the Rainbow Nation into a graveyard of dreams.
We are witnessing the slow collapse of civilisation, one migrant’s corpse at a time.
