WeeklySA_AdminLONG JAIL TERMS FOR MINE BANDITS
No doubt, the sentencing in the North West Regional Court yesterday of 87 illegal miners to long jail terms will send the appropriate message to other bandits operating with impunity at disused mines nationwide.
Thus, we welcome the sentences totalling a combined 696 years handed to the group following their arrest on October 20 2021 during a multi-disciplinary operation in Orkney led by the Hawks Serious Organised Crime Investigation, acting together with Special Task Force and District Illicit Mining Task Team.
The operation followed months of surveillance of the illegal miners who had taken control of a dormant shaft by the barrel of the gun, and conducted a reign of terror in the mine’s neighbourhoods. The operation left six illegal miners dead and eight injured from the shootout that ensued with the police. Police confiscated illegal mining paraphernalia, gold bearing material, two mini buses, eleven firearms (3 shot guns, 4 pistols, 3 rifles and a revolver), about 4000 cartridges of ammunition and bags of food.
All accused, who have been in custody since the arrest, pleaded guilty to charges of robbery with aggravating circumstances.
While conviction and sentence resonate with South Africans’ outrage at criminal activities associated with illegal mining, there is likely – though – to be dissatisfaction in the public over the lenient sentences. Eight years in prison for staging a violent resistance against the law is simply disproportional to the gravity of the crime committed by this gang, given that lives of our police were put in serious danger by their reckless bravado.More so, the accused are most certain to serve only a third of their sentences, in terms of our country’s liberal parole system – something that is shocking and most debilitating, to say the least. Our liberal parole system is counter-productive, affording criminals early release after committing serious crimes, and also no sooner they had been imprisoned and hardly paid their debt to society to the fullest.
Illegal mining is highly organised and rule-bound dangerous business that has spread its tentacles across the key organs of society and the state – not to mention strong suspicion that it has even compromised the country’s criminal justice system, resulting in offenders being released without charge and dockets disappearing.
Of course, there is also talk of the hidden hand of some mining firms allegedly abetting the mayhem with the intention of eluding the taxman. While this dimension still has to be supported by tangible evidence, and therefore should perhaps be treated as mere public conjecture for now, but there is no smoke without fire.
That said, we cannot over-emphasise the need for a multi-disciplinary approach to decisively eradicate this social menace, as current high-profile raids on the mines are just but a palliative that will not yield a long-term solution. Interlinked to this phenomenon are a variety of governance lapses, including illegal immigration, the imperative to address the notion of artisanal mining and the rehabilitation of disused mines.
NO COMPROMISES
DISCRIMINATION: In a country as diverse and divided as Sudan, who gets to define women’s rights and struggles?
By Amuna Wagner
In December 2018, the Sudanese people decided to – once and for all – end Omar al-Bashir’s dictatorship. He had been in power since 1989. Women, who had been disproportionately affected by his regime’s violence, became the beacons of the revolution; at times more than 70 percent of the protesters were female.
After Bashir’s ouster, Sudan entered into a transitional phase in July 2019 with the goal to establish civilian rule by 2024. Determined to keep up their momentum, 2 000 women marched to then-Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok’s office in Khartoum in January 2020. They submitted a petition signed by 46 citizens’ groups and 13 political parties, calling for Sudan to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, end female genital mutilation (FGM), and legally prohibit child marriage.
Throughout the year, women repeatedly took to the streets to demand their political inclusion. On October 25 2021, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan took control of the government in a military coup and suspended the Constitutional Declaration. Since then, the Sudanese people have continued their protest and feminists have taken on the challenge of ensuring that women’s rights are protected and advanced in a society that tries to silence them. Amid the turmoil, a new feminist movement is taking shape, searching for an inclusive and culturally appropriate definition of women’s rights.
Visions for the new Sudan differ depending on a person’s social background, political beliefs, and oftentimes, gender. “In the beginnings of the revolution, we already knew that the Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA), the main organizer of the protests, will not prioritise women’s rights,” says Ounaysa Arabi, a feminist activist, journalist and student of politics at Khartoum University.
“In the winter of 2019, the SPA talked about women cleaning the streets in the new Sudan. So, I called for a women’s protest with fellow feminists.”
Their call was shut down by widespread fear that a feminist protest would shatter the revolution’s unity, attesting to the hierarchies of most revolutionary struggles: civil rights first and women’s rights second. “Men and women alike didn’t want to participate.”
Women were on the front lines of the protests and organizing themselves into unions, but feminists were far from united. Arabi criticises that gender equality in Sudan is limited to statutes, laws, girls’ education, and FGM.
“The feminist movement in Sudan is not progressive. The main groups, which are all made up of the same people, refuse to speak about sex work, LGBTQ+ issues, children of rape, ‘illegitimate’ babies, or matters of inheritance.”
Feminists have not yet agreed on how drastically they want society to change; is political transformation enough, or will it take radical social change to really improve women’s lives?
“During the revolution, some women were kicked out of the Sit-in because their looks didn’t agree with the conservative taste,” says Arabi. “We’re still fighting against strangers, who are not the police, telling us what to do on a daily basis.”
Take, for example, young women’s concerns about attempts to reinstitute the infamous Public Order Laws, which used to dictate admissible fashion for women and punish “moral indecency” with arrests and floggings.
Abolished in 2019, they seem to be making a comeback, remodelled as the “Community Police.” Returning to a practice that disproportionately targets women, based on misogynistic ideas of what is “proper,” would be a major setback for women’s rights, the country, and the ideals of the revolution overall. “I don’t think the military will dare to bring back these laws. The real problem is that society itself continues to uphold them because they give conservative people a sense of stability,” Arabi explains.
Rooted in a history of student and youth activism that dates back to the 1990s, Local Resistance Committees (LRCs) emerged as new political agents for radical social change during the Uprisings. Upon watching their leaders fail, they took the revolution into their own hands, working on political charters while building solidarity through the 5 200 LRCs across the country.
As Muzna Alhaj, an activist and representative of her LRC, explains, they are guided by the Three Nos: No compromise with the regime; No negotiations; No legitimacy to the coup leaders. The LRCs are made up of young people from all socioeconomic classes and ethnic backgrounds. However, feminists have critiqued many LRCs for keeping women out of decision-making processes, by making meetings inaccessible to them (for example holding them at night or in areas that are unsafe for women), or stereotyping their roles in the revolution. Journalist and activist Ilaf Nasreldin writes: “Are we putting the image of revolution before the goals of the revolution, or was equality never a goal to begin with?”
A union in which the LRCs become feminist and feminist movement takes on the democratic structures of the LRCs can have far reaching potential as an alternative, female-led, bottom-up model of governance. “Certain people and classes have been ruling Sudan since independence [1956] and there are always the same issues. As a student of political and social studies, it’s just a déjà vu,” says Arabi. “The only thing that’s changing is the dynamics of the feminist movement. It is nothing like a déjà vu.”
In September 2022, 40 women active in civil society organisations, feminist groups, political parties, rebel movements, and universities formulated a unified gender-responsive constitutional vision. Despite its growing pains, the movement is steadily advancing. “Every single faculty of Khartoum University has a feminist entity,” says Arabi with pride. She is optimistic, because “we’re just making a lot more progress than ‘them’ [the men]. We are forming and reforming and understanding ourselves.” She is hopeful that this new generation can build on the work of their elders and make a difference.
“Sudan is so culturally and ethnically diverse, and our understanding of rights differs across the country. It’s impossible to be unified over everything, but we must find a mutual agenda that we all agree upon. Then, nobody will be able to stop us.”
* Amuna Wagner is a German-Sudanese writer, journalist, and educator. She co-founded and edits the feminist platform, Kandaka. The article was sourced from Africa Is a Country is an outlet of opinion, analysis, and new writing on and from the African left.
Published on the 92nd Edition.
