MALAIKA MAHLATSI | Real crime in SA is when a mother cannot feed her child

On September 20, a six-year-old boy named Khwezi “stole” an orange that was on the ground and then attempted to reach through a fence to “steal” another. This occurred at a smallholding farm in Lutzville, Vredendal.

Khwezi was walking with his mother to do some grocery shopping, and he was likely a bit hungry at the time. Within a few minutes of “stealing” the orange, Christofel Johannes Stoman came out of the smallholding shouting before driving his vehicle at a high speed and then ramming it into the young boy and his mother, pinning them against a fence.

The 70-year-old man accused Khwezi of stealing his oranges and threatened to kill the mother-and-son duo. While he didn’t succeed in killing them, he managed to crush and break both the little boy’s legs. He is currently in Paarl Hospital where doctors are doing everything possible to save his legs.

According to his traumatised mother, Khwezi was due for surgery on Monday. It would be horrific if Khwezi lost his legs. At his age, when children are at their most active and inquisitive, it would be devastating for him to be rendered disabled. But merely because he survived the brutal ordeal, the boy is one of the lucky ones. Maria Makgatho and Locadia Ndlovu were not so lucky.

Just a few weeks before Stoman almost killed little Khwezi, the two women were caught scavenging for food on a farm in northern Limpopo. The farm owner, Zachariah Johannes Olivier, and two of his employees shot them and then fed them to his pigs. Their bodies were discovered a few days later by one of the women’s children, who had to endure the horror of seeing parts of his mother’s decomposed body in a pigsty.

Four months before the murders of Makgatho and Ndlovu, and the attempted murder of little Khwezi, Bandile Tshabalala died a very painful death. The 33-year-old was locked in the cold room at Shoprite Heidelberg for more than 11 hours. His crime was that he had stolen a bar of chocolate. Tshabalala was unemployed and had allegedly gone into the store to steal food. But he was immediately caught by the store’s security officials after having stolen the bar of chocolate. His punishment was death.

I have followed these stories with keen interest, particularly the public comments about them. While many of the comments have been sympathetic, some blame the victims for their demise, arguing that by stealing, they were committing a crime. Someone, in response to a sympathetic comment, argued that having sympathy for “criminals” and justifying theft on account of someone’s socio-economic circumstances sets parameters for rising crime levels in SA which is already battling with a high crime rate.

There have even been economistic arguments that claim that the farmers and Shoprite incur losses from the theft of goods and that this has consequences for their bottom line. I wonder whether people who make such arguments understand that people steal food because they do not have the means to buy it – that an unequal society like ours reduces millions to poverty and unemployment. I also wonder whether people genuinely believe that it is acceptable that a six-year-old should be punished for picking up an orange from the ground, on account that the farmer has lost money from that orange.

If this is how some people reason, then our problem is bigger than just the dehumanising poverty that people are being killed for. No one should have to die because they stole food. Rather, we should ask ourselves why we are comfortable living in a society where someone can afford meat and milk for his dogs, while a mother cannot feed her children. This is the real crime.