Two Mozambican men are dead, slain on South African soil. The police are ‘probing’ this killing, as though the phrase itself were a balm for the festering wound of regional security. Let us not mince words.
This is not an isolated incident. It is a symptom of a deeper decay, a haemorrhage of law and order that has become endemic to the post-apartheid state. One thinks of the Fall of Rome: barbarians at the gate, and within the gate, a populace grown soft, reliant on a bureaucracy that cannot even protect the most vulnerable.
The Mozambican men, nameless in the breaking reports, are casualties of a broader failure: the collapse of the state’s monopoly on violence. We have seen this before. In the Victorian era, the British Empire maintained a fragile peace through ruthless efficiency and a sense of imperial duty.
Today, we have neither. We have platitudes and ‘probes’. The regional security architecture, once a beacon of African renaissance, is now a tattered flag flying over a garrison of incompetence.
The killing of these two men is a portent. It whispers of a future where the borders between nations are meaningless, where criminal networks operate with impunity, and where the state is just another armed faction. South Africa cannot probe its way out of this.
It must act, or it will find itself in a state of permanent siege. The Mozambican men are not the first, and they will not be the last. They are the canaries in the coal mine of a continent losing its grip.
